Engineering Director, Devices Software Engineering

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is very 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. The company is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1200+ colleagues in 80+ countries and very few roles based in offices. 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. We are hiring an Engineer Director, Devices Software Engineering to drive the strategy and implementation of our next-generation Ubuntu hardware enablement quality. This critical function is part of our mission to transform Linux certification, in partnership with the engineering directors of Ubuntu Enablement and Ubuntu Certification. Our goal is to deliver the world's best long term OS stability commitment on PC, server and IoT hardware. We believe that Engineering Directors should be outstanding engineers themselves. They should be very comfortable reviewing a patch or a software design spec. They are trusted engineers who understand the importance of a whole-team effort in creating great products, and who enjoy seeing colleagues develop. They should contribute code themselves to set the standard for coding, but know that the code they write is far less significant than their ability to shape the whole team’s direction, focus and delivery. We grow management skills, and train engineers who are interested in soft skills to be managers. Even though this is a director level position, managing managers, we expect Engineering Directors to be outstanding system software engineers with the confidence to lead by example across the full range of activities in their teams. You’ll need to know how to drive testing and benchmarking to improve the clarity in your teams around quality and performance. You’ll also need to be confident to set and defend high expectations of work ethic, consistency, focus and learning. In this Engineering Director role, you will lead the strategy and the team responsible for quality coordination and integration testing of our software stacks with hardware. We are looking for a quality expert with the ability to establish quality processes from the ground up. The candidate must understand today's PC and ARM IoT hardware, and be excited about the new generation of RISC-V hardware that is on the horizon. They should understand the board and device product lifecycle and know the tools and techniques used to introduce new products. They will work with teams across the company to drive quality improvements through the entire development cycle. This challenging role demands a high degree of technical skill combined with management experience. Today, most Linux certification is poor quality. Vendors run one set of tests and then declare that 'the hardware is certified'. But Linux is not a static platform. We make many more security fixes in the Linux world than people traditionally made in the proprietary OS world - all of these need to be tested on hardware which has been certified, even if that certification is 'old'. Also, Linux and open source evolve significantly every six months, and even more between major enterprise releases like the Ubuntu LTS versions. During the lifespan of an LTS, new kernel improvements will be available to users, and they want to be sure that their hardware will work. Today's Linux certification programs do not meet the needs of its users, and we want to change that. Our intention is to deliver continuous quality and certification across the entire portfolio of certified hardware. Once we have enabled and certified a device, we intend to keep testing it to ensure that every single chang