Engineering Director – Kernel (Remote)

As Kernel Engineering Director at Canonical, you play a key role in the success of Ubuntu, our partners, customers, and the larger Ubuntu community. Canonical’s kernel team delivers a wide array of optimized Linux kernels for Ubuntu on many of the world’s largest clouds and silicon, for data centers, robotics, IoT and edge compute. This role requires strong leadership and operational management skills as well as commercial judgement and the ability to represent Canonical’s kernel strategy and capability to customers and partners.

The kernel engineering operation at Canonical spans many teams and is rapidly growing as we engage with a wide array of silicon and cloud platforms. As an engineering director your primary responsibility is to the teams you support: ensuring that they are continually improving, doing valuable work, are well matched to their assigned challenges, and enjoying meaningful career development at Canonical. You will work at a higher level, ensuring productivity for the whole team, and coordinating across the company. We require extensive engineering experience in director appointments so that decisions and work can be assessed at a technical level, but the mission of a director is to build and develop a group that is highly effective at every level.

As an engineering leader we hold you accountable for the rounded results of your team – not just code, but engagement with the kernel community, documentation, quality, security and product performance.

What you will do

• Lead and grow a globally distributed engineering organization through hiring and coaching
• Focus on talent density and career development
• Maintain Ubuntu’s reputation for secure kernels
• Develop new engineering managers to help create high-performing teams
• Ensure Ubuntu quality through test improvement and Ubuntu kernel testing
• Ensure timely design and delivery of technical solutions
• Set and manage expectations with other internal groups, company leadership, customers and partners
• Grow an outstanding, healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values
• Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
• Work with customers and partners to resolve product issues
• Work from home with global travel up to 20% for company and industry events

Who you are

• You love technology and working with brilliant people
• You have excellent judgement of people, teams and processes
• You are curious, innovative, articulate, and accountable
• You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development
• You are personally interested in organizational management and evolution
• You love contributing to the Linux kernel
• You value getting things done and shipping quality product on time
• You are ready to lead, manage and mentor engineering managers
• You have solid experience working in an agile development environment
• You have a Bachelor’s or equivalent in Computer Science, STEM or similar degree