Site Reliability / Gitops Engineer

Canonical publishes Ubuntu and has been remote-first since 2004, with 1,200+ colleagues across 75+ countries and very few office-based roles.

The role

This position sits in Canonical's Information Systems team, which supports and maintains every one of Canonical's IT production services. The team runs services used by over 60 million Ubuntu users, which is an unusually large blast radius for an internal platform group.

The listing frames it as a role for an "automation-first" technologist with a genuine interest in Linux. You would push operations automation further across both Canonical's private clouds and the public clouds, using open source infrastructure-as-code tooling, CI/CD practice, and Canonical's own operations automation products.

There is a second dimension worth noting. Beyond defining infrastructure as code, you would improve Canonical's products and the open source technologies underneath them by feeding critical operational insight back to developers — filing bugs, sometimes writing pull requests, and collaborating on design with other teams. In other words, running the systems at scale directly shapes what gets built.

You would join a global team of SREs supporting one another across timezones.

What you would do

• Apply infrastructure-as-code experience to steadily increase automation and improve IaC practice within IS
• Automate software operations for reusability and consistency across private and public clouds, accounting for distributed-systems complexity
• Develop new features and improve resilience and scalability across Canonical's cloud and container portfolio
• Maintain operational responsibility for all core services, networks and infrastructure
• Build troubleshooting, capacity planning and performance investigation skills, and run observability tooling including Prometheus, Grafana and Elasticsearch
• Design and maintain monitoring and alerting across systems and services
• Collaborate with development teams on service architecture, documentation, playbooks, policies and operational procedures
• Support globally distributed engineering, operations and support peers
• Share know-how through design sessions, mentorship and pairing
• Carry final responsibility for time-critical escalations

Canonical also states you would be given uninterrupted development time to focus on larger projects and automating manual work — a specific commitment that is rare in SRE postings.

What they are looking for

• Deep experience defining operations in code, using version control, peer review and CI/CD to roll out changes to both applications and infrastructure
• A strong modern engineering background: peer review, unit testing, SCM, CI/CD, Agile
• Python development experience on large projects
• Practical knowledge of Linux networking, routing and firewalls
• Affinity with Linux storage, from Ceph through to databases
• Hands-on enterprise Linux server administration
• Extensive knowledge of cloud computing concepts
• Bachelor's degree or above, preferably computer science or a related engineering field
• Clear English communication across email, chat, video and in person
• Willingness to troubleshoot from kernel to web, and to ask for help when appropriate
• Comfort in fast-changing environments and distributed teams
• Genuine enthusiasm for open source, particularly Ubuntu or Debian

Benefits

• Distributed work with twice-yearly in-person team sprints
• USD 2,000 personal learning and development budget per year
• Compensation reviewed every six months, plus annual bonuses
• 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

Header, og:description and body text all agree: Home based - Worldwide, and the body adds that the role is "available remotely in any timezone." The application even asks which region and timezone you would work from, rather than treating a non-standard location as an exception.

Before applying

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

Expect the standard Canonical academic screening, plus four written or select answers:

• Your experience of site reliability engineering on large-scale applications or systems
• Your experience of infrastructure defined in code
• Your overall proficiency with Python
• What is the first thing you look at when a Linux system performs slowly

That final question is a straight technical test. Have a real answer ready.