Containerization & Virtualisation Engineer

Canonical Group Ltd; Baltimore (MD); Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year

Annual compensation review

Distributed work environment with team sprints

Maternity and paternity leave

Employee Assistance Programme

Travel opportunities

Annual holiday leave

Job summary

A leading open-source technology company seeks exceptional software engineers to focus on virtualisation and container technology. You'll work remotely in a collaborative environment with global teams on next-generation open-source projects. Ideal candidates have strong backgrounds in C/C++, Go, or Rust, with an emphasis on performance and security. Benefits include a personal learning budget and annual compensation review, fostering a culture of growth and support within a distributed workforce.

Qualifications

• Exceptional academic track record from high school and university.
• Experience with open-source virtualisation or container technology.
• Professional written and spoken English.

Responsibilities

• Design and specify new features, building consensus on approach.
• Conduct security analysis and reviews.
• Collaborate proactively with a distributed team.
• Create and monitor performance benchmarks to optimise your product.
• Collaborate proactively with a distributed team.
• Write high‑quality code to create new features.
• Debug issues and produce high‑quality code to fix them.
• Review code produced by other engineers.
• Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions.

Skills

Open-source virtualisation

Container technology

Kernel development

C/C++ programming

Go programming

Rust programming

Python programming

Linux experience

Excellent communication skills

Education

Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or STEM

Job description

Home based - Americas, Baltimore

Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is widely used in breakthrough enterprise initiatives such as public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. Our customers include the world's leading public cloud and silicon providers, and industry leaders in many sectors. The company has been a remote-first organization since 2004, with 1000+ colleagues in 70+ countries and very few office-based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person at interesting locations worldwide to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder‑led, profitable, and growing.

This is a general selection process for software engineers focused on virtualisation and container technology - from the kernel through userspace. Apply if you are an exceptional Go, Rust, or C/C++ engineer and want to work on next‑generation open source VMM or container technology, or related open source networking and storage.

Container, virtualisation, and cloud infrastructure are essential to modern software deployments. Canonical invests in open source related to application isolation, workload orchestration, system or OCI containers, micro‑service architecture, and cloud infrastructure.

Examples of projects underway at Canonical include:

• RustVMM – a new hypervisor for Linux, built in Rust with emphasis on performance, security, and operability.
• Rockcraft – designing an elevated Docker image experience for the open source community.
• LXD – a modern system container and virtual machine manager used on Ubuntu, ChromeOS, and other Linux platforms.
• MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes – building lightweight and sophisticated Kubernetes deployments.
• Charmed OpenStack, OVN / OVS, and Ceph – delivering cloud platform technologies to large‑scale computing environments.

These teams hire system‑level C/C++, Go, Rust, and Python developers to work on security‑critical, performance‑critical, and mission‑critical code, focused on software delivery, containers, security, sandboxing, application orchestration, and management.

Location: remote container and virt engineering roles in every time zone.

What you will focus on

• Design and specify new features, building consensus on approach.
• Engage with upstream communities in your area of expertise.
• Conduct security analysis and reviews to ensure defence in depth.
• Create and monitor performance benchmarks to optimise your product.
• Collaborate proactively with a distributed team.
• Write high‑quality code to create new features.
• Debug issues and produce high‑quality code to fix them.
• Review code produced by other engineers.
• Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions.

What we are looking for in you

• An exceptional academic track record from high school and university.
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science or STEM, or a compelling narrative about an alternative path.
• Drive and a track record of going above‑and‑beyond expectations.
• Experience with open‑source virtualisation or container technology.
• Experience working in the kernel or very low‑level system.
• Professional written and spoken English.
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred).
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability.
• Passion, thoughtfulness, and self‑motivation.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills.
• Result‑oriented, with a personal drive to meet commitments.
• Ability to travel twice a year, for company events up to two weeks each.

Additional skills we value

• Performance engineering and security experience.

What we offer you

We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognise outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance‑driven annual bonus. We provide all team members with additional benefits that reflect our values and ideals, balanced to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.

• Distributed work environment with twice‑yearly team sprints in person.
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year.
• Annual compensation review.
• Recognition rewards.
• Annual holiday leave.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• Employee Assistance Programme.
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues.
• Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long‑haul company events.

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open‑source projects and the platform for AI, IoT and cloud, we are changing the world every day. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence – to succeed we need to be the best at what we do.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer