Site Reliability Engineer at Canonical - Linux IaC Career in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Career trajectory: This SRE/GitOps role sits at a high-impact intersection — you're not just keeping lights on; you're shaping infrastructure for 60 million Ubuntu users. That scale of operational ownership is a significant career credential, especially for engineers aiming toward Staff/Principal SRE or Platform Engineering leadership roles.
Skills in high demand: The role develops a powerful combination of sought-after competencies:
- GitOps & IaC (Terraform, Juju, Ansible) — rapidly growing hiring category
- Observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch) — near-universal enterprise requirement
- Python automation at scale — enduringly valuable
- Multi-cloud architecture (private + public cloud) — premium skill set
Compensation context: Canonical does not publish salary ranges, which is a mild yellow flag for transparency. Market benchmarks for SRE roles at this level range from $100k–$160k USD in the US/UK, and Canonical historically pays competitively for global talent. Clarify band and equity (if any) early.
Green flags: Founder-led and profitable (rare in tech) signals stability. The explicit mention of "uninterrupted development time" suggests the company respects engineering focus — a strong work-life balance signal. Mentorship culture and peer learning are actively built into the role.
Potential consideration: On-call responsibilities for "time-critical escalations" means this isn't a pure 9-to-5 role. Understand the rotation model and incident frequency before accepting.
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 a Site Reliability / GitOps Engineer to our Information Systems (IS) team. This role is an opportunity for an "automation-first" technologist with a passion for Linux to build a career with Canonical and drive the success with those leveraging Ubuntu and open source products. If you have experience of IT operations automation, Infrastructure as Code and a passion for technology, then you will enjoy working with some of the best people in the industry at Canonical.
Job Summary
The IS team at Canonical supports and maintains all of Canonical's IT production services. The team is in charge of running services used by over 60 million Ubuntu users.
As an SRE & GitOps Engineer you'll be in a unique position to drive operations automation to the next level, both in our own private clouds as well as in the public clouds. We do this by utilizing the best of open source infrastructure as code software, software development practices such as CI/CD pipelines, and Canonical's leading products for software operation automation.
In addition to defining the infrastructure as code, you will improve Canonical products and the open-source technologies they're based on by providing critical feedback to developers on how their products operate at scale. This is done by submitting bugs (and sometimes writing pull requests) and collaborating on design and implementations with other teams within the company.
You'll be part of a global team of SREs that work together and support each other to provide the best possible services to our company, Canonical's customers, and the Ubuntu Community.
Location: This role is available remotely in any timezone.
As a Site Reliability / GitOps Engineer, you will
- Apply your experience of IaC to develop infrastructure as code practice within IS by constantly increasing automation and improving IaC processes
- Automate software operations for re-usability and consistency across private and public clouds, taking into consideration the complexities of distributed systems
- Develop new features and improve the resilience and scalability of the existing cloud and container portfolio at Canonical
- Maintain operational responsibility for all of Canonical's core services, networks, and infrastructure
- Develop skills in troubleshooting, capacity planning, and performance investigation; set up, maintain and use observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch; design, implement and maintain monitoring and alerting for various systems and services
- Collaborate with development teams to design service architecture, documentation, playbooks, policies, and operational procedures
- Provide assistance and work with globally distributed engineering, operations, and support peers
- Be given uninterrupted development time to focus on larger projects and automation of manual tasks
- Share your experience, know-how, and best practices with other team members in design sessions, mentorship, and "doing work together"
- Carry final responsibility for time-critical escalations
What we are looking for in you
- Deep experience and knowledge to define operations in code, using version control, peer review, and CI/CD to roll out changes both to applications and infrastructure
- Strong modern engineering background (peer-review, unit testing, SCM, CI/CD, Agile)
- Python software development experience, with large projects
- Practical knowledge of Linux networking, routing, and firewalls
- Affinity with various forms of Linux storage, from Ceph to Databases
- Hands-on experience administering enterprise Linux servers
- Extensive knowledge of cloud computing concepts and technologies
- Bachelor's degree or greater, preferably in computer science or related engineering field
- Able to communicate clearly and effectively in English over email, chat, video, voice calls, and in-person
- Motivated and able to troubleshoot from kernel to web, and willing to ask others when appropriate
- A willingness to be flexible and able to learn new things quickly
- Inspired by the needs of fast-changing environments
- Happy to work within distributed teams
- Passionate about and familiar with open source, especially Ubuntu or Debian
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.