Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS)

Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS)

Join to apply for the Software Engineering Manager (Backend SaaS) role at Canonical

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. Our customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders in many sectors. The company is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office‑based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder‑led, profitable, and growing.

We are hiring an engineering manager to lead the reboot of our Landscape systems management solution for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is growing rapidly in the enterprise, with estates expanding from cloud to bare metal servers to vSphere clusters, and of course desktops and devices. Ubuntu is easy to deploy and configure, one node at a time, but it's difficult to know where you stand on policy and compliance, patch management, or access control across a large estate.

We started work on Landscape many years ago, and the current generation of the service reflects the choices of the day. We now have the opportunity to invest significantly in a team to bring a fresh new vision for large‑scale Ubuntu estate management to the project. That doesn't make this a greenfield opportunity – we have a system that serves thousands of deployments – but we know we want to step back and give it a big new push, letting go of some things that are no longer so important, and embracing a range of new priorities. This role is the critical engineering leadership role for that mission.

Today we use Python, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, HAProxy, and have a ReactJS front end. In other web services projects we use more Golang these days. Our next wave of Landscape engineering is an opportunity to raise the bar on SAAS and on‑prem solution technologies, architectures, patterns and operations. Our goal is to make it easy for enterprises to own a few Landscape instances that serve their global estate, and to be able to apply policy and know intuitively where they stand – globally – in a very complex world of mixed Ubuntu versions, substrates and flavours.

Engineering managers at Canonical bring both technical and management skills to the leadership of their teams. You will work closely with product managers, and produce an engineering roadmap with ambitious and achievable goals. A successful applicant will be capable of growing a team of engineers, collaborating with other engineering and business teams at Canonical, and providing periodic updates about successes and areas of improvement.

As an engineering manager at Canonical you must be technically strong, but your responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do important work, do it outstandingly well, find professional and personal satisfaction, and work well with colleagues and community. Technical leadership experience and a background in software engineering are necessary prerequisites for this role. You will be expected to lead, challenge, and develop strong engineers, positively influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution.

We work in Python and Golang, and expect engineering managers to be fluent in the language, architecture and components that their team uses. Code reviews and architectural leadership are part of the job. As manager, the commitment to healthy engineering practices, documentation, quality and performance optimisation are equally important technical responsibilities, as is the requirement for fair and clear management, and the obligation to ensure a high performing team.

Key responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of engineers in your region
• Develop talent through coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands‑on career development
• Demonstrate sound engineering principles and directly contribute toward your team's goals
• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, management, and external stakeholders
• Lead modern, agile software development practices
• Ensure a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
• Build automated, highly reliable image delivery, testing and publication pipelines
• Engage with many other teams at Canonical, as well as the open source community and commercial partners
• Work from home with global travel 4-6 weeks per year for internal and external events

Valued skills and experience

What we offer colleagues

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer. We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.

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