Cloud Field Engineering Manager

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world on a daily basis. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence – to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do.

Canonical has been a remote-first company since its inception in 2004. Work at Canonical is a step into the future, and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game. Canonical provides a unique window into the world of 21st-century digital business.

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.

The Role: Cloud Field Engineering Manager

This is an exceptional opportunity to lead a field engineering team, empowering customers to understand and implement Canonical's open source solutions across public clouds and their own data centers. You will work across the entire spectrum of cloud offerings, from Ubuntu itself to virtualization, private cloud, Kubernetes, and the implementation of sophisticated open source solutions such as MLOps platforms, data platforms, and more.

We are rapidly expanding the range of open source solutions we offer and deliver to customers, moving into new industries like telco, finance, health care, and media. We design and develop new open source solutions to meet their evolving needs.

Engineering Management Philosophy

We believe that Engineering Managers should be outstanding engineers themselves. They should feel completely at home troubleshooting technical issues and having technical presales conversations with customers. While they contribute to project delivery, their technical contributions are less significant than their ability to shape the whole team's direction, focus, and delivery. We foster management skills and train engineers, who are interested in soft skills, to become managers.

We believe that open source is just beginning to transform the tech sector and enterprise compute. Our goal is to make open source easier, more reliable, and more secure for deployment and development. We strive to be the provider of 'most software to most companies'. To achieve this ambition, our engineers are carefully selected from applicants across the globe, chosen for brilliance and motivation to elevate open source. Our engineering managers help teams achieve more than they realized they could, instilling pride in the results.

Responsibilities of a Cloud Field Engineering Manager at Canonical

The Field Engineering team comprises cloud solutions architects at Canonical, working directly with customers to design private and public cloud solutions tailored to their workload needs. The product portfolio includes on-premise cloud solutions such as OpenStack, MicroCloud, and Ceph, and solutions deployable either on-premises or in public clouds, including Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Spark, and PostgreSQL. The team works hands-on with these technologies, deploying, testing, and handing over solutions to our support or managed services team at project completion. Managers and team members also engage in presales conversations, offering technical advice during the sales process.

As a Cloud Field Engineering Manager, you are responsible for line management and career guidance. Critical to success are your abilities to develop engineering talent, technically represent your team, and drive collaboration with other teams and customers. You are also expected to actively participate in technical presales to help our department achieve quarterly goals.

This role is home-based, managing a team within your time zone.

What Your Day Will Look Like

• Lead and develop a team of Field engineers, ranging from graduate to senior, in Presales and Professional Services.
• Solve customer problems by promoting our technologies and acting as a trusted advisor.
• Work remotely within a single major time zone.
• Coach, mentor, and provide career development feedback.
• Identify and measure team health indicators.
• Implement disciplined engineering processes.
• Represent your team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers.
• Develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices.
• Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects.
• Be an active part of the leadership team, collaborating with other leaders.

What We Are Looking For In You

• Knowledge of cloud computing concepts & technologies, such as Kubernetes, OpenStack, AWS, GCP, Azure, Ceph, etc.
• Practical knowledge of Linux and networking.
• Experience in technical presales.
• A dynamic person who loves to jump into new projects and interact with people.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.
• Passion and a track record of developing and growing people.
• Experience in leading, coaching, and mentoring engineers.
• Organized and able to ensure your team delivers timely, high-quality results.
• An exceptional academic track record from high school and, preferably, university as well.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time for internal company events, external tech events, and customer meetings.

Additional Skills That You Might Also Bring

• Second language - Spanish or French preferred.
• Python knowledge.
• Experience collaborating with external partners.
• Experience collaborating with several internal teams and providing stakeholder feedback for engineering roadmaps.

What We Offer You

We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognize outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus. We provide all team members with additional benefits, which reflect our values and ideals. We balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.

• Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person.
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year.
• Annual compensation review.
• Recognition rewards.
• Annual holiday leave.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues from your team and others.
• Priority Pass for travel and travel upgrades for long-haul company events.

Key skills/competency

• Cloud Computing
• Open Source
• Kubernetes
• OpenStack
• AWS, GCP, Azure
• Linux
• Networking
• Technical Presales
• Team Leadership
• Mentoring