From the listing
About the role
This is an opportunity to run the worldwide Telco Field Engineering business, helping customers understand and implement Canonical's open source solutions in public clouds and in their own data centers. The Telco department is composed of three regional teams (APAC, EMEA and AMER) working across the entire spectrum of cloud offerings, from Ubuntu to Kubernetes and sophisticated MLops platforms.
The Field Engineering department is our team of cloud solutions architects working directly with customers to design private and public cloud solutions. As the telco industry moves to software-defined services driven by open source, Canonical enables operators to embrace this new world with high-quality automation for operations at scale.
We believe that Engineering Directors should be outstanding engineers themselves who feel at home troubleshooting technical issues and having presales conversations. Our goal is to make open source easier, more reliable, and more secure, striving to be the provider of ‘most software to most companies’.
What you'll do
- Lead and develop managers and teams of Field engineers in the areas of Presales and Professional Services.
- Solve customer problems by promoting technologies and acting as a trusted advisor.
- Coach, mentor, and offer career development feedback to engineers and managers.
- Identify and measure team health indicators and implement disciplined engineering processes.
- Represent the team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers.
- Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects while collaborating with the leadership team.
- Actively participate in technical presales to help the department achieve quarterly goals.
What they're looking for
- Thorough technical understanding of telco NFVi (VIM), NFVO, VNFM, MEC space, and key technologies like CPU Pinning, NUMA, SR-IOV, and DPDK.
- Familiarity with telco architecture and industry standards.
- Working knowledge of at least one domain: Mobile Packet Core (4G/5G), Private Network, RAN, Voice, IP Backbone, VAS or OSS/BSS.
- Knowledge of cloud computing concepts and technologies such as Kubernetes, Openstack, AWS, GCP, Azure, or Ceph.
- Practical knowledge of Linux and networking.
- Experience in technical presales and leading/mentoring engineers and managers.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.
- Exceptional academic track record from high school and university.
- Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time.
Nice to have
- Fluency in a second language, preferably Spanish or French.
- Python knowledge.
- Experience collaborating with external partners and providing stakeholder feedback for engineering roadmaps.
- Understanding of AI and machine learning concepts including sovereign AI and network optimization applications.
- Exposure to frameworks such as 3GPP, TM Forum ODA, eTOM, ETSI NFV, ONAP, or O-RAN.
From the company page
Canonical benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Canonical has been a fully distributed organization since its origin in 2004. Our remote-first policy enables us to collaborate with the best in the world in our domain.”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on Canonical
Canonical is a bit tricky for me to review for a few reasons:
Their Glassdoor reviews have dropped down to 3.1 (March 25, 2026), right at my threshold. I'd want to see this start trending in the correct direction in order to consider them for inclusion again.
I like they they have yearly sprints in cool locations like Cape Town, Madrid, and London.
I like that hire-from-anywhere/work-from-anywhere roles are clearly labeled on the job listings as "worldwide."
I'd like to read more about how they feel about their employees traveling as a digital nomad, or being location-independent in general.
I'd like to see more details about the perks they do or don't offer employees, though I suspect they vary by hiring region.
Please get back to me, because I would like to include you again, but need a few more details to do so.