Staff IAM Engineer at Canonical - Remote EMEA/AMER — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Canonical is one of the most nomad-friendly employers in tech — fully remote since 2004, with 1,200+ staff across 75+ countries. This role is explicitly open to the EMEA and AMER regions, giving digital nomads enormous geographic flexibility within those zones.
Schedule & async culture: Canonical is known for its async-first approach, though as a staff-level engineer leading technical discussions, you should expect some overlap with European and American time zones. If you're based in Lisbon (UTC+0/+1), Istanbul (UTC+3), or Medellín (UTC-5), you'll be well within the expected coverage window.
Travel perks worth noting:
- Priority Pass membership and travel upgrades for long-haul company events — a rare and valuable perk for nomads who already frequent airports.
- 2–4 weeks of international travel per year for team and company meetups, fully company-funded.
- USD 2,000/year learning & development budget you can use for courses, certifications, or conferences.
Visa considerations: Since no salary is published, cost-of-living comparisons are approximate. However, at a staff-level engineering salary (typically $130k–$180k USD equivalent), living in Lisbon (~$2,500/mo), Bangkok (~$1,800/mo), or Medellín (~$1,500/mo) would offer a very comfortable lifestyle with significant savings. Portugal's D8 Digital Nomad Visa, Colombia's Digital Nomad Visa, and Thailand's LTR Visa are all viable pathways depending on your citizenship.
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 Staff-level Software Engineer for Identity Management to work on authorization and access management across Canonical's suite of enterprise products and web services, using Go (Golang) and Python.
As a software engineer for Identity Management products of Canonical, you will modernize and expand the capabilities of the identity management solutions we use for authentication and authorization in our products, as well as our canonical.com and ubuntu.com websites. Your work on Identity Management will directly impact the users of all Canonical products. In addition, you will help write Juju charms to manage operational concerns.
Technical excellence and a background in software engineering are necessary prerequisites for this role. You will be expected to own the design and delivery of the system, facilitate integrations, and work with your team on strategy and execution.
Location: This role will be based remotely in the EMEA and AMER regions.
The Role Entails
- Collaborate proactively with a distributed team, leading technical efforts and discussions
- Write clean web service APIs to support both CLI and web frontend clients, using Go (Golang) and Python
- Design and implement new features and enhancements from spec to production and ongoing operations at scale
- Review code produced by other engineers, helping set quality standards
- Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions
- Create and enhance management, authentication, and authorization API endpoints
- Craft end-user authentication flows from design to implementation
- Write Juju charms (operators) to manage operational concerns
- Modernize the identity stack of our websites and products by driving adoption of best-of-breed IAM technologies
- Deliver great products that users love by maintaining a culture of quality and engineering excellence
- Work from home with global travel 2 to 4 weeks per year for internal and external events
What We Are Looking For
- Staff-level or experienced senior software engineer, with specific experience building identity and access management products
- Familiarity with open source software, standards, protocols, and concepts in the identity space (e.g. OpenID, OAuth, LDAP)
- Experience implementing authorization frameworks in distributed systems
- Values secure coding and standards, and enjoys working on teams that do the same
- Comfortable with Ubuntu as a development and deployment platform
In addition:
- Exceptional academic track record from both high school and university
- Undergraduate degree in a technical subject or a compelling narrative about your alternative chosen path
- Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
- Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
- Ability to travel internationally twice a year for company events up to two weeks long
What We Offer
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 recognize outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus or commission. 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 conferences 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
- Team Member Assistance Program & Wellness Platform
- 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 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.