As the IS Architect, you'll be in a unique position to improve Canonical products and the open-source technologies they're based on. You do this by advising System Reliability Engineers (SRE) and Data Center Engineers (DCE) about best practices, and make informed decisions on technology choices in all aspects of cloud infrastructure and services. You will coach the IS team on automation, reliability, operational/technical scalability, network infrastructure and security.

This is a home based position, with twice-annual travel to company events totalling 2-4 weeks per year.

Key responsibilities

• Setup, maintain and update the technical design roadmap and guidelines for the SREs within IS, with the aim of improving reliability, resilience, operational scalability, and technical scalability
• Own the design of the coming generations of global data centers and infrastructure
• Collaborate with, and provide the cloud-ops software development teams with input for roadmap, requirements and prioritization to build a world-class, highly standardized and automated operation
• Provide the IS management with input and advice with regards to technology, reliability, resilience and business cases
• Lead technical choices to implement solutions as self-service products, ensuring scalable operation
• Collaborate with product security as well as operations security to set best practice and mitigate new threats in a timely manner
• Automate operations for reuse across the worlds largest companies, taking into consideration the complexities of distributed systems
• Collaborate with development teams to design service architecture, documentation, playbooks, policies and operational procedures
• Analyze incidents and events, and establish what the reason behind the reasons are, and what structural improvements can be made to minimize the chance of them reoccurring
• Provide assistance and work with globally distributed engineering, operations, and support peers

Valued Skills And Experience

• Bachelor's degree or greater, preferably in computer science or related engineering field
• Extensive knowledge of cloud computing concepts, technologies & operation
• Practical knowledge of Linux networking, routing, and firewalls, internet transit and large scale/bandwidth networking.
• Hands-on experience of automatic administration of enterprise Linux servers at scale
• Experience dealing with significant production outages, incident response and postmortems
• The ability to see the big picture in all the details
• A passion for writing, sharing, and maintaining enterprise open-source software solutions
• Strong modern software engineering background (peer-review, unit testing, SCM, CI/CD, Agile)
• Strong knowledge of best practices in data center design with regards to networking and hardware choices.
• Able to communicate clearly and effectively in English over email, chat, video or voice calls and in-person
• Be inspired by the needs of fast-changing environments
• Happy to work within distributed teams
• A willingness to be flexible and able to learn new things quickly
• Be familiarized and passionate about open-source, especially Ubuntu or Debian

This Engineering Management role is an opportunity for a technologist with a passion for Linux and Ubuntu to build a career with Canonical and drive the success of the business. If you have an affinity for open source development, then you will enjoy working with some of the best people in the industry at Canonical.

What you'll do

• Demonstrate sound engineering principles through architecture, development and code reviews
• Be responsible for planning, estimation and execution
• Work with product management to define the vision and strategy for Ubuntu
• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, senior management, and external stakeholders
• Build and lead a distributed regional team of engineers
• Offer coaching, mentoring, technical feedback and hands-on career development
• Advocate and advance modern, agile software development practices
• Design, embrace and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices
• Grow a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with company values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organization
• Work from home with international travel up to 6 weeks per year for internal and external events

Valued Skills And Experience

• Deep knowledge of Debian/Ubuntu architecture
• Good understanding of Debian packaging policy, tools and techniques
• High quality software engineering with in-depth knowledge of C/C++ and Python
• Engagement with open source communities and processes
• Experience in one or more of: Linux system architecture, boot process, Java/GCC/Python/Rust/Go toolchains, ARM and/or RISC-V
• Experience managing software developers with a track record of planning, delivery and quality
• A love of developing and growing people and a track record of doing it
• Experience working in an agile development environment