Openings at Canonical

About the job

As the Engineering Director of Community you will have a broad impact and responsibility for growing community engagement and processes across all of engineering. If you want to define what building the next generation of open source community looks like, this is the role for you.

You will be responsible for assisting various teams at Canonical in broadening their community engagement activities. You will ensure that all engineering teams make community an important aspect of how they do what they do. You'll provide assistance to new and existing contributors seeking to get involved or expand their role, and connect community contributors with mentors. You will organise cross-team participation in community events and mentoring.

Outside of those responsibilities you will assist the Ubuntu community team in ensuring community processes are high quality and consistently implemented.

What You Will Do

• Collaborate proactively with multiple distributed teams
• Help engineering teams establish and achieve community engagement goals
• Establish consistency in community process, engagement, and interaction across engineering
• Influence others and represent technical insight to customers and other engineers
• Spend a significant amount of time mentoring others and providing cross-team input
• Work from home with global travel 4 to 6 weeks for internal and external events
• Collaborate with the developer advocates and PR teams at Canonical to promote Ubuntu and related technologies via blogs and social media.
• Identifying relevant influencers and devising plans on how to effectively engage with them.

Who You Are

• You have a long history and clear public record of community engagement, particularly with open source communities
• You are capable of representing Canonical / Ubuntu externally
• You have experience leading successful projects and teams
• You are an articulate communicator
• You are comfortable preparing and giving presentations
• You love technology and working with brilliant people
• You follow industry trends and new technologies
• You understand and value how you do what you do, as well as what you do
• You have strong collaboration and influencing skills
• You are curious, flexible, articulate, and accountable
• You value soft skills and are passionate, enterprising, thoughtful, and self-motivated
• BS/BA or equivalent in Computer Science, Technical Communication, English, or a related field

We offer

• Learning and Development opportunities and budget
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual leave
• Priority pass for travel
• Flexible working option

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What You Will Do

• Implement support for new WSL features in Ubuntu
• Closely follow upstream development in WSL
• Manage Ubuntu WSL applications in the Microsoft Store
• Implement support for Ubuntu features on WSL
• Contribute to upstream projects in support of WSL features
• Define, manage and execute test plans
• Manage Ubuntu Hyper-V images in the Quick Create gallery
• Work with other teams at Canonical to deliver agreed features
• Help the Desktop Team to ensure that Ubuntu is released every 6 months on schedule
• Responding to, and work to resolve, issues raised by end users and customers

Who You Are

• A clear passion for the future of Ubuntu on WSL.
• Demonstrable contribution to an open source project.
• C/C++ and Python experience, preferably with an open-source project.
• Awareness of some of the open-source development tools used in creating Ubuntu Desktop, such as git, Launchpad, and Debian packaging tools.
• Capacity to learn quickly about new systems and techniques.
• Excellent logic, problem solving, and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong English language communication skills.
• Comfortable with online communication and collaboration tools such as mailing lists, Mattermost, and wiki.
• Ability to be productive in a globally distributed team through self-discipline and self-motivation, delivering according to a schedule.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a technical field.
• 1+ years of experience as a software developer in a professional setting.

What Is a Nice To Have

• Experience with Windows Subsystem for Linux, virtualization, and containers.
• Knowledge of PowerShell, Visual Studio, and Azure DevOps.
• Knowledge of some of the technology stack that makes up an Ubuntu desktop (GNOME, D-Bus, systemd, Xorg/Wayland, etc.).
• Be an existing Debian or Ubuntu contributor/developer.
• Awareness of agile development methodologies and tools.

We offer

• Learning and Development opportunities and budget
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual leave
• Priority pass for travel
• Flexible working option