Engineering Manager - App Stores

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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 and industry leaders in many sectors. With over 1 200 colleagues in more than 75 countries, the company practices global distributed collaboration;

teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder‑led, profitable, and growing.

This is a technical management role to lead a team that develops Python and Golang micro‑services powering our global software‑distribution engine. The Snap Store and Charmhub.io marketplaces are the consumer-facing names of a unified system that understands key concepts such as architectures, releases, betas, release candidates, stable releases, branches, and more. We are on a journey to transform the experience people around the world have with open‑source software by significantly expanding the range of software we can deliver through this system.

If you have a passion for clean APIs, believe that great engineers ship software calmly and regularly against an agile plan, and know that tests are the key to higher velocity and reliability, you'll fit right in.

This is a great opportunity to take part in engineering a highly scalable SaaS product (think of the load on our systems when one of our largest Ubuntu Desktop snaps is updated by the publisher, for instance). In addition, you will have the opportunity to learn from Canonical's world‑class security team as we work collectively to deliver this capability, safely, to our customers around the world.

As an Engineering Manager at Canonical you must be technically strong, but your main responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You will review code as leader, but you realize that the best way to improve the product is to ensure that the whole team is focused, productive and unblocked. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do meaningful work, achieve high quality results, and collaborate well with colleagues and the community.

You will also be expected to be a positive influence on culture, facilitate technical delivery, and regularly reflect with your team on strategy and execution. You will collaborate closely with other Engineering Managers, product managers, and architects to produce an engineering roadmap with ambitious and achievable goals.

Engineering Managers are expected to be fluent in the programming language, architecture, and components their team uses. Code reviews and architectural leadership are part of the job. The commitment to healthy engineering practices, documentation, quality and performance optimisation is as important as the requirement for fair and clear management, and the obligation to ensure a high‑performing team.

Location
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This role may be based remotely in the Americas, Europe, Middle East or Africa time zones.

• Lead a remote team of engineers in your time zone
• Develop talent through coaching, mentoring, feedback, and hands‑on career development
• Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams, management, and external stakeholders
• Act as an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
• Build clean web‑service APIs to support both CLI and web‑frontend clients, using Python (and optionally Golang)
• Engage with many other teams at Canonical, as well as the open‑source community and commercial partners

• Good experience in leading modern, agile software development practices
• Experience in forming a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the company values
• Demonstrated experience of being a role model for sound engineering principles and directly contributing toward your team's goals
• Willingness to travel up to 4 times a…