Containerization & Virtualisation Engineer

Home based - Americas, Albany

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is 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, as well as industry leaders in many sectors. The company has over 1,000 colleagues in 70+ countries and very few office‑based roles, with teams meeting in person two to four times yearly in interesting global locations to align on strategy and execution.

Canonical is founder‑led, profitable and growing. 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++ developer 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 are essential to modern software deployments. We invest in open‑source projects around application isolation, workload orchestration, system or OCI containers, micro‑service architecture, and cloud infrastructure.

Here are some examples of projects underway at Canonical.

RustVMM has great potential as a new hypervisor for Linux. We are building a team to work on this, emphasising performance, security, and operability. Your work will be in Rust, pushing your expert knowledge of VMM, kernel networking, and storage capabilities.

The Rockcraft team is designing and implementing an elevated Docker image experience for the open‑source community, addressing quality, consistency, and security of Docker images on Docker Hub and other registries.

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

Members of the Kubernetes product team build MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. We work on K8s itself and on operations tooling around it.

The OpenStack team delivers Charmed OpenStack, OVN/OVS, and Ceph, bringing cloud platform technologies to large‑scale computing environments.

These teams hire system‑level C/C++, Go, Rust, and Python developers for security‑critical, performance‑critical, and mission‑critical code around containers, security, sandboxing, orchestration, and management.

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

What you will focus on

• 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

What we are looking for in you

• 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
• Experience with open‑source virt or container tech
• 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

Additional skills we value

• Performance engineering and security experience

What we offer you

We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to recognise outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance‑driven annual bonus and a suite of benefits that reflect our values and ideals.

• 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 Programme
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
• Priority Pass, and travel upgrades for long‑haul company events

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open‑source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and the cloud, we are changing the world daily. We recruit globally and set a very high standard for people joining the company, expecting excellence – we need the best at what we do.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer

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