Engineering Director, Commercial Systems

About Canonical

Canonical is a leading provider of open-source software and operating systems for global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is very 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 more than 80 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.

About the Role

We are hiring an Engineering Director, Commercial Systems, who strives for taking ownership of the development and operations of internal software products serving Canonical business and a popular security solution Livepatch. A successful candidate has a track record of delivering full-stack software services, adheres to high engineering quality standards, and continuously develops their skills as well as skills of their direct reports. This is an exciting opportunity to work with highly enthusiastic people on exciting innovative engineering solutions supporting Canonical's growth and learn a lot about engineering for the business.

The Engineering Director, Commercial Systems will lead the Commercial Systems unit that is conceived as three engineering teams that closely collaborate with other engineering and business teams at Canonical. Services designed, developed, and operated by the Commercial Systems unit are at the heart of Canonical business. We are looking for a software engineering director to oversee the three software teams led by software engineering managers.

The Billing Team

The Billing team designs, develops, and operates a Golang service that provides a standardized and scalable capability to turn metrics into billable amounts, enable customers to see their current spend with Canonical at any time, and ensure accurate, reliable, and timely billing. The service further integrates with other engineering, business and payment systems.

The Contracts Team

The Contracts team designs, develops, and operates a Golang service that will become the single source of truth for all contracts with all customers. The service provides a standardized CPQ capability and stores signed contracts in a structured format. The service further integrates with other engineering and business systems including a CRM system and an accounting system.

The Livepatch Team

The Livepatch team designs and develops a service for the delivery of Linux kernel patches to shrink the exploit window for critical and high severity Linux kernel vulnerabilities, by patching the Linux kernel between security maintenance windows, while the system runs. The engineering team behind this product develops Golang based client and backend components, while another Canonical team, the Kernel team, develops the security patches.

Key Responsibilities

• Leading multiple teams of engineers, ranging from graduates to seniors
• Developing your engineering managers to maintain Canonical culture in their teams
• Developing and evangelize great engineering practices and processes in the teams
• Setting and implementing solid performance management with performance goals and objectives with your direct reports and teams
• Identifying and measuring indicators of team health, and take action where needed
• Being accountable for the product development roadmaps in the teams
• Being an active part of the Commercial Systems leadership team, collaborating with other leaders
• Expanding your teams by hiring great talent
• Collaborating with stakeholders and product users

What We Are Looking For In You

• Exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in a technical subject or a compelling narrative about your alternative chosen path
• Proven ability to drive multiple teams or large teams of software engineers to deliver outstanding results
• Engineering experience in at least one of the following areas: Golang, Python, Java, or distributed integrations
• Track record of going above-and-beyond expectations to achieve outstanding results
• Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
• Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
• Ability to travel internationally twice a year, for company events up to two weeks long

Nice-to-have Skills

• Performance engineering and DevOps/SRE experience
• Experience with accounting, sales, sales operations, or other business roles

What We Offer Colleagues

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 or commission. 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 Program
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
• Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long haul company events

Key Skills/Competency

• Engineering leadership
• Software development
• Full-stack services
• Golang
• Distributed systems
• Product roadmaps
• Team development
• Performance management
• Stakeholder collaboration
• Billing systems
• Contracts management
• Linux kernel