Information Systems

This is an opportunity for a seasoned open source technologist to define the best practice in infrastructure as code at a global scale. Join us to advance the state of the art, and shape the infrastructure behind tens of millions devices running Ubuntu.

The Information Systems (IS) team is responsible for all IT operations at Canonical, including the infrastructure for building, packaging and distributing Ubuntu globally. As the IS architect, you will own the design of hardware and software implementation from PCI lanes to CDN and everything in between. Our goal is to be a reference operation, using the latest capabilities in Ubuntu and open source more generally, with the most modern operating principles. Your choices will impact the Ubuntu user experience for millions of users, and drive how Canonical's engineers engage with compute and network resources in a dev-ops setting.

As the IS Architect, you'll be in a unique position to improve Canonical products and the open-source technologies they're based on. You do this by advising System Reliability Engineers (SRE) and Data Center Engineers (DCE) about best practices, and make informed decisions on technology choices in all aspects of cloud infrastructure and services. You will coach the IS team on automation, reliability, operational/technical scalability, network infrastructure and security.

This is a home based position, with twice-annual travel to company events totalling 2-4 weeks per year.

**Key responsibilities**:

- Setup, maintain and update the technical design roadmap and guidelines for the SREs within IS, with the aim of improving reliability, resilience, operational scalability, and technical scalability
- Own the design of the coming generations of global data centers and infrastructure
- Collaborate with, and provide the cloud-ops software development teams with input for roadmap, requirements and prioritization to build a world-class, highly standardized and automated operation
- Provide the IS management with input and advice with regards to technology, reliability, resilience and business cases
- Lead technical choices to implement solutions as self-service products, ensuring scalable operation
- Collaborate with product security as well as operations security to set best practice and mitigate new threats in a timely manner
- Automate operations for reuse across the worlds largest companies, taking into consideration the complexities of distributed systems
- Collaborate with development teams to design service architecture, documentation, playbooks, policies and operational procedures
- Analyze incidents and events, and establish what the reason behind the reasons are, and what structural improvements can be made to minimize the chance of them reoccurring
- Provide assistance and work with globally distributed engineering, operations, and support peers

**Valued skills and experience**:

- Bachelor's degree or greater, preferably in computer science or related engineering field
- Extensive knowledge of cloud computing concepts, technologies & operation
- Practical knowledge of Linux networking, routing, and firewalls, internet transit and large scale/bandwidth networking.
- Hands-on experience of automatic administration of enterprise Linux servers at scale
- Experience dealing with significant production outages, incident response and postmortems
- The ability to see the big picture in all the details
- A passion for writing, sharing, and maintaining enterprise open-source software solutions
- Strong modern software engineering background (peer-review, unit testing, SCM, CI/CD, Agile)
- Strong knowledge of best practices in data center design with regards to networking and hardware choices.
- Be inspired by the needs of fast-changing environments
- Happy to work within distributed teams
- A willingness to be flexible and able to learn new things quickly
- Be familiarized and passionate about open-source, especially Ubuntu or Debian

Canonical is a growing international software company that works with the open-source community to deliver Ubuntu, the world's best free software platform. Our services help businesses worldwide reduce costs, improve efficiency and enhance security with Ubuntu.

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