Senior Containerization and Virtualisation Engineer

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the 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.

We have customers including 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 1000+ colleagues in 70+ countries and very few office based roles.

The teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution. We are a founder led, profitable and growing company.

This is a general selection process for software engineers focused on virtualisation and container technology - from the kernel through userspace. Apply if you are an exceptional Go, Rust, or C/C++ software engineer and want to work on next-generation open source VMM or container technology, or related open source networking and storage.

Container, virtualisation and cloud infrastructure have become essentials of modern software deployments. We invest in open source related to application isolation, workload orchestration, system or OCI containers, micro service architecture or cloud infrastructure.

We are building a team to work on several projects under way at Canonical, including RustVMM, Docker images and LXD. These projects offer great opportunities for performance, security and operability. Work in Rust and bring your expert knowledge of VMM and related kernel networking and storage capabilities.

LXD is a modern system container and virtual machine manager that is widely used on Ubuntu, ChromeOS and other Linux platforms. LXD engineering spans the entire software stack from low-level kernel work on namespaces, confinement, security, filesystems, VMMs and networking, to the high level management REST API and CLI.

Members of the Kubernetes product team build MicroK8s for on-rails K8s, and Charmed Kubernetes for more sophisticated integration. We work on K8s itself and on the operations tooling around it.

Our teams hire system level C/C++, Golang, Rust and Python developers to work on security-critical, performance-critical and mission-critical code, focused on software delivery, containers, security, sandboxing, application orchestration and management.

Location: we have remote container and virt engineering roles in every time zone.

• Design and specify new features, building consensus on approach
• Engage with upstream communities in your area of expertise
• Conduct security analysis and reviews to ensure defence in depth
• Create and monitor performance benchmarks to optimise your product
• Collaborate proactively with a distributed team
• Write high quality code to create new features
• Debug issues and produce high quality code to fix them
• Review code produced by other engineers
• Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions

• An exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or STEM, or a compelling narrative about your alternative path
• Drive and a track record of going above-and-beyond expectations
• You have worked on open source virt or container tech
• You have experience working in the kernel or very low level system
• Professional written and spoken English
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Passion, thoughtfulness, and self-motivation
• Excellent communication and presentation skills
• Result-oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments
• Ability to travel twice a year, for company events up to two weeks each

• Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2000 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