Containerization Virtualisation Engineer

📋 Description

• • Shape the future of cloud-native infrastructure at Canonical by owning the design, build, and optimization of container and virtualization technologies that power millions of Ubuntu instances worldwide. You will sit at the intersection of kernel engineering, cloud operations, and open-source innovation, ensuring that Ubuntu remains the preferred platform for Kubernetes, LXD, and KVM workloads.
• • Architect and maintain Canonical’s container runtime stack—from the low-level mechanics of cgroups and namespaces to high-level orchestration with MicroK8s, Charmed Kubernetes, and LXD clustering. Your code will land in Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, and the official Ubuntu Cloud Images used by AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenStack.
• • Drive performance and security hardening initiatives across container runtimes (containerd, CRI-O) and hypervisors (QEMU/KVM). Benchmark I/O, CPU, and memory isolation; profile startup latency; and deliver patches upstream that improve density and reduce blast radius for multitenant environments.
• • Automate repeatable virtualization workflows using Juju bundles, MAAS bare-metal provisioning, and cloud-init. Build CI/CD pipelines that spin up thousands of ephemeral VMs and containers for regression testing, ensuring every kernel, QEMU, and containerd revision is validated before it reaches customers.
• • Provide deep technical guidance to Canonical’s largest enterprise and telco accounts. Join architecture reviews, craft reference designs for 5G edge clouds, and deliver workshops that translate complex cgroups internals into actionable runbooks for SRE teams.
• • Collaborate with upstream communities—Linux Kernel, Kubernetes SIG-Node, Open Container Initiative—and shepherd Canonical contributions from mailing-list patch to merged PR. Represent Canonical at KubeCon, OpenStack Summit, and Ubuntu Summit, turning community feedback into roadmap features.
• • Own the full lifecycle of Canonical’s virtualization products: gather requirements from field engineers, write specifications, implement features in Go/C, shepherd code reviews, package for Debian/Ubuntu, and publish release notes. You will be the named maintainer for packages such as qemu-kvm, libvirt, and lxd.
• • Champion observability and day-2 operations by integrating Prometheus, Grafana, and Canonical’s own COS (Canonical Observability Stack) into every virtualization layer. Build alert rules that detect noisy-neighbor issues, memory ballooning, and container escape attempts before they impact workloads.
• • Mentor junior engineers and interns through pair programming, design sessions, and weekly “kernel office hours.” Create internal documentation and runbooks that demystify KVM nested virtualization, eBPF-based security policies, and live-migration tuning.
• • Influence Canonical’s long-term technical strategy by authoring whitepapers and blueprints that map emerging hardware—confidential computing, DPU offloads, RISC-V—to new virtualization capabilities. Your thought leadership will guide multi-year investments and partnerships with silicon vendors.