Golang Engineer (All Seniority Levels)

Canonical publishes Ubuntu, the Linux platform behind a large share of the world's public cloud, AI, IoT and enterprise infrastructure. The company is founder-led, profitable, and genuinely distributed: 1,200+ colleagues across more than 80 countries, with very few office-based roles and most people working from home since 2004.

An unusual way to apply

This is not a posting for one specific team. Canonical is hiring Go engineers at every seniority level, across all relevant teams, and uses this single listing as the entry point. After the first round of interviews they work with you to identify the product team that best matches your interests, and your application progresses from there.

For candidates that is a meaningfully lower-friction route: you apply once as a Go engineer rather than guessing which team to target, and the fit conversation happens after they have already met you.

Where Go sits at Canonical

Canonical reaches for Golang where performance and security matter most. It underpins the systems that deliver Ubuntu to the world — software distribution, the infrastructure that builds and tests open source across every architecture, systems management tooling, and distributed systems R&D.

Go components appear across Juju, Livepatch, LXD, MAAS, Microk8s, Snapd, Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Pro, among others. The company cites Go's concurrency model and developer ecosystem as the reason.

There is a second thread too: Canonical wants Ubuntu itself to be the best platform for Go development, with broad access to tooling for open source and enterprise work.

Elsewhere the stack includes substantial Python, C and C++ projects, growing investment in Rust, and React and Flutter on the front end.

What the role entails

• Designing and implementing well-tested, well-documented software in Go
• Debugging and fixing issues your users encounter
• Taking part in code and architectural reviews
• Collaborating with the community and colleagues on technical specifications
• Looking for improvements to engineering and operations practice
• In some cases, deploying and operating the services your team builds
• Supporting your product through technical advocacy

What they are looking for

• Exceptional academic record from both high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or STEM, or a convincing account of your alternative path
• Experience designing and writing high-quality Go software on Linux
• Genuine depth in Linux at the system level. The listing is emphatic: extensive personal Linux experience is required, and the more distributions the better
• For more senior roles, experience building, deploying and operating distributed systems and APIs
• Professional written and spoken English
• Curiosity, flexibility, accountability and self-motivation
• Willingness to travel twice a year for company events of up to two weeks

Nice to have

• Experience developing for Ubuntu specifically
• Familiarity with Juju, LXD, Microk8s, Snapd, Ubuntu Core or Ubuntu Pro
• Performance engineering and security experience

Benefits

• Distributed work with twice-yearly in-person team sprints
• USD 2,000 personal learning and development budget per year
• Annual compensation review, plus performance-driven bonus or commission
• Recognition rewards, annual holiday leave, maternity and paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Program
• Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long-haul company events

No salary figures are published on this listing. Canonical states that compensation reflects geographic location, experience and performance, and is reviewed annually.

Three things to know before applying

AI use disqualifies your application. The form requires you to confirm you used only your own words.

The academic screening is unusual. Expect to rank your high-school mathematics and native-language performance on bands reaching "top 0.01% in the region," and to justify those against national scoring systems. Candidates without a degree are explicitly invited to apply and may enter "no degree."

Travel is a firm requirement. Two to four internal events a year, one to two weeks each, in locations likely to require international travel, visas and vaccinations.

Two written answers are also required: your contribution to the largest Go project you have worked on, and the engineering contribution you are most proud of. Both are worth drafting properly rather than improvising.