Engineering Manager Ceph at Canonical - Lead & Grow in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
This is a senior leadership role at one of the most respected open source companies in the world. Canonical's Ubuntu underpins cloud infrastructure at AWS, Azure, and GCP — so the work has genuine industry impact. Leading the Ceph & Distributed Storage team places you at the intersection of storage engineering, infrastructure, and open source community leadership.
Skills you'll develop or deepen:
- Distributed systems leadership and software-defined storage architecture (Ceph is a top-tier, in-demand skill)
- Managing globally distributed engineering teams — a rare and highly valued capability
- Python and C++ technical oversight at scale
- Agile delivery in a remote-first, async culture
Compensation signals: No salary is disclosed, which is a minor red flag for transparency. Canonical engineering manager market rates typically range from $150K–$220K+ USD annually depending on seniority and geography, though Canonical's global hiring model means pay can vary. Research before applying.
Green flags: Founder-led, profitable (not VC-dependent), 20+ years of remote-first culture, genuine technical depth required, and real community impact via open source. Canonical promotes from within and values engineering excellence over politics.
Red flags to consider: The role demands both deep technical credibility and strong people management — a difficult combination. Up to 20% travel may not suit everyone. The lack of public salary data warrants a direct conversation early in the process.
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 75+ countries and very few office-based roles. 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 Engineering Manager for Ceph & Distributed Storage. The world creates more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day! We want to help teams to store data in open source storage on commodity hardware — safely, cheaply, and simply.
Our goal is to make Ceph easy to install, manage and use — from large enterprise data center installations to half-rack edge sites. We believe that distributed storage shouldn't be hard, and to keep up with the increasing data storage demands, it needs to be easier than ever before. We have a range of tools to bring to bear on the problem, and we're excited to make distributed Ceph easy enough that everyone does it.
As an engineering manager at Canonical you must be technically strong, but your primary responsibility is to run an effective team and develop the colleagues you manage. You are expected to help them grow as engineers, do important work, do it outstandingly well, find professional and personal satisfaction, and work well with colleagues and community. Technical leadership experience and a background in software engineering are necessary prerequisites for this role. You will be expected to lead, challenge, and develop strong engineers, positively influence the culture, facilitate technical delivery, and work with your team on strategy and execution. You will be responsible for sound software architecture and best practices in software quality, testing, and documentation.
What You'll Do
- Lead a team building a Ceph-focused software-defined storage solution
- Build and manage a globally distributed team of engineers
- Develop your team through coaching, mentoring, and feedback
- Demonstrate sound engineering principles by directly contributing toward your team's goals
- Set reasonable schedules based on considered estimates, with feedback loops for improvement
- Set and manage expectations with other engineering teams and external stakeholders
- Advance modern, agile software development practices
- Maintain a culture of quality and engineering excellence
- Grow a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with company values
- Be an active part of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organisation
- Work from home with global travel up to 20% for internal and external events
Who You Are
- You have a software engineering background, preferably with Python and C++ experience
- You have experience operating scale-out storage clusters on Linux in production environments, preferably with Ceph
- You love embracing new technologies and pushing the boundaries of what is possible
- You love developing and growing people and have a track record of doing it
- You have an interest in building products that improve how people operate software and infrastructure everywhere
- You are knowledgeable and passionate about software development
- You have experience in leading, managing, coaching, and mentoring software developers towards delivering timely, high-quality software together
- You have solid experience working in an agile development environment
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 of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence; in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since our inception in 2004. Working here is a step into the future and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.
Canonical is an equal opportunity employer.
We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.