At Canonical it is our mission to make open source software available to people everywhere. We believe the best way to fuel innovation is to give the innovators the technology they need.  As a Systems Reliability Engineer (SRE) for the Information Services (IS) team you'll play a key role in driving this mission and helping to define the future of free software.

Why this job is important

IS supports and maintains all of Canonical’s production services and IS team members use real-life operational experiences to contribute to product improvements.  The IS team at Canonical runs the services used by over 60 million Ubuntu users.  As an SRE you’ll be in a unique position that will allow you to provide critical feedback to developers by writing code, submitting bugs, and working with others within the company to ensure that Canonical products are as good as they can be.  You will also be able to develop and submit fixes and enhancements directly.

What you will learn at this job

SREs work closely with development teams to build and maintain the extraordinary infrastructure required to run all of Canonical and Ubuntu’s systems and services.  The scope of our responsibility combined with the overall size of our environment means that our SREs face new challenges every day.  You can expect to gain hands-on experience in the following areas:

• Software development in Python and Go in order to automate repetitive tasks


• Continuous integration and continuous deployment using a combination of open source and Canonical developed tools


• Operating clouds at scale using OpenStack, Ceph, MAAS and Juju


• Deploying, troubleshooting, and optimising services running on both private and public clouds using open source software like Ubuntu, Apache, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, and Squid.

Canonical’s IS team embraces autonomy and to that end has instituted Self Directed (SD) time. A portion of your work week is set aside to allow you to work on what you think will most benefit the IS team specifically and Canonical in general.

Key Responsibilities

SREs rotate through three roles:

1. Maintaining all core services, networks, and infrastructure (including public and private clouds).  The ability to work under pressure and demonstrate sound problem solving skills in a fast-paced and complex environment are key here.


2. Working directly with a variety of development teams within Canonical in a devops role to test, deploy, monitor and maintain services running on our production clouds. This will require an overlap of development and administration skills, as you help write and review code you will then use to deploy and maintain services using Canonical's cloud products.


3. Larger project work, currently focused on large scale cloud deployments and overall process improvements.  This role gives SREs the ability to utilize development and architecting skills in a focused manner that is unique to Canonical.