Engineering Manager - Distributed Systems, Python / Go
Job description
Engineering Manager for Distributed Systems Testing at Canonical, leading a team that builds the quality engineering platform for deploying and validating distributed systems across Canonical's cloud portfolio. The role combines people leadership with hands-on software engineering judgement.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Work mode
- Remote
- Languages
- English – fluent
What you'll do
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of software and quality engineers, ranging from graduate to senior level
- Set clear expectations, strengthen engineering practices, and ensure timely delivery against agreed goals
- Partner with senior engineers to shape technical strategy, architecture, roadmap, and engineering standards
- Guide the development of automated testing infrastructure for the reliability, interoperability, and resilience of distributed systems
- Improve CI pipelines, testing tools, and reporting used to validate Canonical's products and solutions across bare-metal, private and public cloud environments
- Enable engineering teams across Canonical to adopt effective distributed-systems testing practices and tooling
- Contribute technical leadership through design and code reviews, debugging, and hands-on engineering where appropriate
- Represent the team with stakeholders and collaborate across Canonical on quality engineering, infrastructure, and developer experience
What we're looking for
- An exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
- Experience in leading, coaching, and mentoring software engineers
- Professional software engineering experience with Python or Go
- Expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, quality engineering, or a closely related domain
- Strong knowledge of modern software testing processes, strategies, and automation
- Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
- Strong technical judgement and the ability to engage meaningfully in code reviews, architecture discussions, and software design
- Experience working in an agile development environment with the ability to organize a team to deliver high-quality results
- Professional written and spoken English with excellent communication and presentation skills
- Great interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability, demonstrating passion, thoughtfulness, and self-motivation
- Ability to travel twice a year, for company events up to two weeks each
Nice to have
- Cloud technologies such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, Juju, Terraform, AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure
- Designing testing strategies for distributed or cloud-native systems
- Building or operating large-scale CI/CD and test infrastructure
- Applying AI or machine learning to test analysis, failure classification, or engineering workflows
- Deploying, operating, or debugging distributed systems
- Leading globally distributed teams
Your team
Distributed Systems Testing
Ensures the performance, correctness, resilience and interoperability of Canonical cloud solutions built with technologies such as Juju, Terraform, OpenStack and Kubernetes, deployed and tested from bare-metal to the public cloud.
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About Canonical
A leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets
Canonical publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and a leading platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud. Its customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, as well as industry leaders across many sectors. Canonical is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1,200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office-based roles.
Key facts
- 1,200+ colleagues
- 2004
- Open source software and operating systems
- 1,200+ colleagues in 75+ countries
- Very few office-based roles; most colleagues have worked from home since inception in 2004
- Founder-led, profitable, and growing
- Teams meet two to four times yearly in person
- Publishes Ubuntu
What they value
- Excellence
- Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background
- Fairness globally