Microservices Engineer

About Canonical and the Microservices Engineer Role

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to global enterprise and technology markets. Our Ubuntu platform is widely adopted in cutting-edge initiatives like public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. We serve top-tier public cloud and silicon providers, as well as industry leaders across various sectors. Canonical champions global distributed collaboration, with over 1200 colleagues in more than 75 countries and minimal office-based roles. Teams gather two to four times annually in diverse international locations to align on strategy and execution.

This is a general selection track for teams focused on back-end REST API microservices engineering using Go and Python. It encompasses all levels of seniority. We seek outstanding engineers with a clear understanding of APIs, microservice design, engineering processes, and DevOps.

Our services must scale to support millions of Ubuntu clients and facilitate collaboration among thousands of community members. They are also crucial to critical global infrastructure. As Ubuntu becomes central to mainstream enterprise computing through cloud and developer-centric tech strategies, the quality of these services is increasingly vital to customers and users. We are committed to significantly improving our web services practices, quality, and performance. By expanding our teams, we aim to enhance our insights into scalability, performance, resilience, and advanced DevOps practices.

Key areas of interest include:

• API design, documentation, and governance
• Database performance design considerations and skills
• Multi-region service delivery for resilience and performance
• Fuzzing and other proactive security analysis techniques
• Tracing and profiling for distributed systems insights
• Next-generation DevOps practices

Location: Our Microservices Engineer teams have open roles across every time zone, supporting a global remote work environment.

What your day will look like as a Microservices Engineer

• Write high-quality, well-designed, and robust software that performs at scale
• Design APIs and software architecture for peer review
• Develop tests to validate software behavior
• Build and maintain reliable, fault-tolerant applications and services
• Proactively collaborate with a globally distributed team
• Demonstrate technical leadership both internally and within our external communities
• Debug issues and implement high-quality solutions
• Contribute to top-tier technical documentation
• Engage in discussions and collaborate across Canonical teams
• Work from home with global travel twice annually for company events

What we are looking for in you

• Exceptional academic record from high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or STEM, or a compelling alternative career path
• Strong drive and a history of exceeding expectations
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go
• Experience writing modern, maintainable software
• Familiarity with relational and non-relational database systems
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery experience
• Experience with systems programming or scalable web services
• Professional written and spoken English
• Linux experience (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Passion, thoughtfulness, and self-motivation
• Outstanding communication and presentation skills
• Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
• Ability to travel twice a year for company events, each up to two weeks

Additional Skills That You Might Also Bring

• Experience with container technologies like LXD, Docker, and Kubernetes
• Understanding of build systems and toolchains
• Experience with cross-compilation
• Experience with hyperscale public clouds and/or private clouds
• Experience designing, building, and running distributed systems
• Performance engineering and security expertise

What we offer you

We determine compensation based on geographical location, experience, and performance, reviewed annually (more frequently for graduates and associates) to recognize outstanding contributions. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus. Our comprehensive benefits package reflects our values, balancing local needs with global fairness, and includes:

• Distributed work environment with twice-yearly in-person team sprints
• 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
• Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long-haul company events

Key skills/competency

• Microservices Architecture
• Go Programming
• Python Programming
• REST API Design
• Distributed Systems
• DevOps Practices
• Scalability
• Database Systems
• Cloud Computing
• Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)