Ubuntu Engineering Manager

📋 Description

• • Lead a globally-distributed team of 25-35 Ubuntu engineers who build, test, and ship the operating system that powers more than 70 % of public cloud workloads and 90 % of OpenStack deployments worldwide. Your leadership directly influences the daily experience of millions of developers, sysadmins, and end-users who rely on Ubuntu for everything from AI model training to edge robotics.
• • Own the full engineering lifecycle—from roadmap definition and sprint planning through continuous integration, automated testing, and release orchestration—ensuring that every kernel patch, security update, and feature lands on schedule and at production-grade quality. You will balance urgent CVE fixes with long-term architectural investments, making trade-offs that protect both enterprise stability and community agility.
• • Drive technical strategy in close partnership with Product Management, Design, and Field Engineering to translate customer pain points and market signals into an executable backlog. You will prioritize work that advances Canonical’s position in cloud, AI/ML, confidential computing, and IoT while maintaining Ubuntu’s reputation for security, performance, and ease of use.
• • Foster a culture of inclusive, asynchronous collaboration across 15+ time zones. You will refine rituals that keep the team aligned without excessive meetings, champion documentation-first practices, and mentor senior engineers to become the next generation of technical leaders. Your coaching style balances autonomy with accountability, enabling engineers to do the best work of their careers from wherever they choose to live.
• • Establish and track OKRs that connect daily commits to business outcomes—reducing kernel regression rates, cutting cloud instance boot time, increasing snap adoption, or expanding hardware enablement coverage. You will present these metrics quarterly to Canonical’s executive team and use them to justify staffing, tooling, and process investments.
• • Act as the escalation point for high-severity incidents affecting Ubuntu users in Fortune 500 environments, government agencies, and research institutions. You will coordinate war-room response, post-mortems, and preventive action plans, turning each crisis into a learning opportunity that strengthens the platform and the team.
• • Champion open-source best practices both internally and upstream. You will represent Canonical at kernel.org, Debian, GNOME, and cloud-native communities, ensuring that Ubuntu’s contributions are timely, respectful, and strategically aligned. Your visible leadership helps attract top-tier talent and reinforces Canonical’s credibility as a good-faith open-source steward.
• • Continuously modernize the engineering stack—CI/CD pipelines, build farm capacity, automated testing harnesses, and observability tooling—to keep pace with exponential growth in cloud instances, IoT devices, and AI workloads. You will evaluate emerging technologies (e.g., confidential VMs, RISC-V, WebAssembly runtimes) and make build-vs-buy decisions that future-proof the platform.
• • Collaborate with Legal, Security, and Compliance teams to navigate export regulations, CVE disclosure policies, and supply-chain security mandates (SBOM, SLSA, reproducible builds). Your leadership ensures that Ubuntu remains the trusted foundation for regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and defense.
• • Plan and facilitate two to four in-person sprints per year in locations such as Cape Town, Montréal, or Berlin, combining strategic planning with team-building adventures. You will design agendas that maximize face-to-face value while respecting the remote-first ethos that defines Canonical’s culture.