Remote Ceph Storage Engineer at Canonical - EMEA/Americas — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Canonical is one of the most nomad-friendly employers in tech — fully remote since 2004, with 1,200+ employees across 75+ countries and no expectation of office attendance. This role is open to EMEA and the Americas, which covers an enormous range of popular nomad destinations.
Schedule flexibility: Canonical operates with a distributed async culture by default, though cross-timezone collaboration will require some overlap hours depending on where your teammates are. With coverage spanning EMEA and the Americas, expect to be online during a window roughly between UTC-5 and UTC+3 on most days.
Visa considerations: The wide geographic scope means many nomad-visa-friendly countries are within scope — Portugal's Digital Nomad Visa, Spain's Digital Nomad Visa, Georgia's Remotely from Georgia program, and Colombia's Digital Nomad Visa are all viable options. For short stays, tourist visas in Thailand or Mexico (popular nomad bases) may work depending on your passport.
Travel perks matter here: Canonical includes a Priority Pass membership and travel upgrades for long-haul company events — a genuine perk for travelers. You'll also be required to travel up to 4 times per year for internal team sprints (one week each), often to interesting international locations.
- Lisbon: Monthly cost ~€2,000–2,800; excellent timezone fit for EMEA; Portugal Digital Nomad Visa available
- Medellín: Monthly cost ~$1,200–1,800 USD; covered under Americas scope; Colombia Digital Nomad Visa available
- Cape Town: Monthly cost ~$1,500–2,000 USD; EMEA scope; favorable time zone overlap
The $2,000/year learning budget can also fund coworking memberships or certification courses relevant to distributed systems.
Canonical is a leading provider of open source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is very 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 is a pioneer of global distributed collaboration, with 1200+ colleagues in 75+ countries and very few office-based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, in interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.
The company is founder-led, profitable, and growing.
We are hiring a Software Engineer for Ceph & Distributed Storage. As part of Cloud Engineering, you'll be building modelling software to drive systems such as OpenStack, Ceph, and Kubernetes with a focus on distributed storage and Ceph. You'll be engineering solutions to scale in production, working with our field teams to ensure we're meeting the needs of customers looking to adopt cutting-edge technology.
Applicants should be passionate about the future of the software defined datacenter, distributed systems, and open source. Canonical is a globally distributed team of engineers who share that passion, and you will need to work well in that context. Engineers who thrive at Canonical are mindful of the dynamics of the open source ecosystem, and equally aware of the needs of large, innovative organizations.
This job involves international travel several times a year, usually for one week at a time.
Location: This role will be based remotely in EMEA or the Americas regions.
What your day will look like
- Write high quality, rigorously designed Python and Golang software
- Collaborate proactively with a globally distributed team
- Debug issues and produce high quality code to fix them
- Contribute to technical documentation that defines best practices for authoring high quality operators
- Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions
- Develop and maintain software for delivery, operations, and life-cycle management of Ceph storage
What we are looking for in you
- Bachelor's or equivalent in Computer Science, STEM, or similar degree
- Experience with writing modern, maintainable Python
- Experience with Ceph storage
- Love of technology and working with brilliant people
- Curious, flexible, articulate, and accountable
- Value soft skills and are passionate, enterprising, thoughtful, and self-motivated
- Interest and experience with two or more of the following: Linux, Kubernetes, Public cloud, OpenStack, LXC/LXD, Python, Go, Debian packaging
- An exceptional academic track record from both high school and preferably university
- Willingness to travel up to 4 times a year for internal events
Additional skills that you might also bring
- Experience operating Ceph clusters in production
- Experience with open source distributed storage such as Gluster, Minio, Mayastor, or similar
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, which reflect our values and ideals. We balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.
- Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person — we've been working remotely since 2004!
- 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 from your team and others
- Priority Pass for travel 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 the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence; in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since our inception in 2004. Working here is a step into the future and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.
Canonical is an equal opportunity employer
We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.
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