Ceph & Cloud Storage Engineer at Canonical | Open Source in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Canonical's engineering roles are highly regarded in the open source world, and this position sits at the intersection of two hot infrastructure domains: distributed storage (Ceph) and cloud-native operations (Kubernetes, OpenStack). Both are in strong demand across hyperscalers, telcos, and enterprise infrastructure teams.
Skills you'll build:
- Production-grade Python and Go engineering — both highly marketable in 2024+
- Deep Ceph expertise — rare and very valuable; Ceph specialists command premium salaries
- Operator pattern and lifecycle management for Kubernetes workloads
- Open source project collaboration and upstream contribution experience
Compensation: Canonical does not publish salary ranges, which can be a yellow flag for transparency-minded candidates. Compensation is geo-adjusted, so your offer will depend heavily on your location. Mid-level distributed systems engineers typically earn $90K–$150K USD equivalent in Western markets; Canonical tends to land competitively but not at the very top of the market for senior engineers.
Culture signals: Founder-led, profitable, and bootstrapped (no VC pressure) — this signals stability and long-term thinking rather than growth-at-all-costs. The emphasis on academic track records and high performance standards suggests a meritocratic, rigorous culture. The remote-first DNA since 2004 is a strong green flag for work-life balance.
Green flags: Fully remote, global team, open source credibility, meaningful infrastructure work, $2K L&D budget.
Watch for: Salary opacity, strong emphasis on academic credentials may disadvantage self-taught engineers, and the expectation of up to 4 international trips/year may not suit everyone.
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 Software Engineer for Ceph & Distributed Storage. As part of Cloud Engineering, you'll be building modelling software to drive systems such as OpenStack, Ceph, and Kubernetes with a focus on distributed storage and Ceph. You'll be engineering solutions to scale in production, working with our field teams to ensure we're meeting the needs of customers looking to adopt cutting-edge technology.
Applicants should be passionate about the future of the software defined datacenter, distributed systems, and open source. Canonical is a globally distributed team of engineers who share that passion, and you will need to work well in that context. Engineers who thrive at Canonical are mindful of the dynamics of the open source ecosystem, and equally aware of the needs of large, innovative organizations.
This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week at a time.
Location: This role will be based remotely in EMEA or the Americas regions.
What your day will look like
- Write high quality, rigorously designed Python and Golang software
- Collaborate proactively with a globally distributed team
- Debug issues and produce high quality code to fix them
- Contribute to technical documentation that defines best practices for authoring high quality operators
- Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions
- Develop and maintain software for delivery, operations, and life-cycle management of Ceph storage
What we are looking for in you
- Bachelor's or equivalent in Computer Science, STEM, or similar degree
- Experience with writing modern, maintainable Python
- Experience with Ceph storage
- Love of technology and working with brilliant people
- Curious, flexible, articulate, and accountable
- Value soft skills and are passionate, enterprising, thoughtful, and self-motivated
- Interest and experience with two or more of the following: Linux, Kubernetes, Public cloud, OpenStack, LXC/LXD, Python, Go, Debian packaging
- An exceptional academic track record from both high school and preferably university
- Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events
Additional skills that you might also bring
- Experience operating Ceph clusters in production
- Experience with open source distributed storage such as Gluster, Minio, Mayastor, or similar
What we offer you
We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognise outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus. We provide all team members with additional benefits, which reflect our values and ideals. We balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.
- Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person — we've been working remotely since 2004!
- Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
- Annual compensation review
- Recognition rewards
- Annual holiday leave
- Maternity and paternity leave
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues from your team and others
- Priority Pass for travel and travel upgrades for long haul company events
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.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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