Senior Juju Software Engineer (Go)

Canonical publishes Ubuntu and is one of the largest commercial contributors to open source. It has been remote-first since 2004, with 1,200+ colleagues across 75+ countries and very few office-based roles. The company is founder-led, profitable and growing.

What Juju is, and why the role matters

Juju is the engine behind model-driven operations. It provides a way to operate complex software across public cloud, private cloud, Kubernetes and bare metal, and together with the Ops framework it forms a complete solution for managing applications and infrastructure.

The dependency list is what makes this interesting: Juju is relied on by Canonical Managed Solutions, the OpenStack and cloud delivery teams, and Fortune 500 companies. Work here lands in production for a lot of people who did not choose it themselves.

The role

This is a senior individual contributor position with a real leadership component. Beyond owning functional areas end to end, you would drive process improvement, assist the manager in running the team, and coach less experienced colleagues.

What your day looks like

• Owning design, delivery and support of features in a highly concurrent, highly distributed system driving cloud automation at scale
• Collaborating proactively across a distributed team
• Debugging issues and engaging with upstream communities in public
• Working alongside experienced engineers across a range of specialisms
• Discussing ideas and working through solutions collaboratively
• Coaching and developing team members with less experience, contributing to building a strong engineering team
• Working from home, with global travel of two to four weeks a year for internal and external events

What they are looking for

• A proven track record of professional software delivery in Go
• Hands-on experience building highly concurrent distributed systems
• Excellent written and verbal English, particularly in online settings
• An exceptional academic record from high school and preferably university
• Experience with agile development methods
• Willingness to travel up to four times a year for internal events

Useful but not expected

Canonical is explicit that nobody is expected to bring all of these:

• Container technologies such as Docker, LXD or Kubernetes
• Development in C, C++, Rust or other low-level languages
• Solid networking background
• Linux and open-source experience
• Configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef or Puppet
• Working knowledge of cloud computing
• A focus on software quality and testing
• Packaging experience with Debian or snaps
• SQL and NoSQL database work
• Experience on a distributed team on an open source project, including community contributions
• A demonstrable record of open source contributions
• Prior experience writing Terraform plugins

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 annual bonus
• Recognition rewards, annual holiday leave, maternity and paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long-haul company events

No salary figures are published on this listing.

Location — an important discrepancy

The listing contradicts itself. The structured location field at the top of the posting reads "Home based - EMEA", while the body text states "This is a Globally remote role."

This has been filed as EMEA, because the header is the structured field Canonical's own systems use and it is the more restrictive of the two readings. If you are outside EMEA and otherwise a strong fit, it is worth asking Canonical directly rather than assuming either version is correct.

Three things to know before applying

AI use disqualifies your application. You must confirm you used only your own words.

Expect academic screening. High-school mathematics and native-language performance bands justified against national scoring systems, plus your degree result. Candidates without a degree may enter "no degree."

Two written answers are mandatory: your experience with Go and its use in highly concurrent applications, and your experience with Linux, cloud automation or cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes. Both reward preparation.