Software Engineer - Secure Container Images at Canonical

Job Overview: Software Engineer - Secure Container Images at Canonical

Join Canonical's innovative team as a Software Engineer focusing on Secure Container Images. With over 10 billion pulls, Canonical's container images are critical for developers globally, ensuring secure and scalable software deployment. This role involves advancing the state-of-the-art with “rocks”, a new generation of minimal, high-performance Ubuntu-based container images backed by long-term security commitments. You will be instrumental in transforming upstream open source software into continuously maintained, tested, and signed artifacts, empowering developers with confidence.

This is a dynamic, multi-disciplinary software engineering position. You will engage with a wide array of container technologies and numerous open source projects, often utilizing multiple programming languages. A core aspect of the role is building robust CI/CD pipelines to package, build, test, and publish images at scale. Your experience will define your seniority, with opportunities to mentor junior colleagues and contribute significantly to the team's technical direction.

Key Responsibilities (This role entails):

• Build and maintain a growing portfolio of high-quality, hardened container images.
• Design and operate automated CI/CD pipelines for building, testing, scanning, signing, publishing, promoting, and retiring images across diverse environments and architectures.
• Develop tooling and tests to ensure security compliance and cloud-native compatibility.
• Collaborate with the community and partners, sharing container expertise and keeping our portfolio current with new features, patches, and applications.
• Work closely with product security, platform, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams.
• Provide essential technical input for team decision-making processes.
• Establish and uphold quality standards, defining image guidelines for security, compatibility, performance, size, and developer experience.
• Expand our knowledge base and author technical content about our work.
• Operate within a collaborative, agile, and globally distributed team environment.
• Mentor colleagues and actively participate in hiring initiatives.
• Work remotely with up to 15% global travel for internal and external events.

What We Are Looking For in You:

• Proficiency in Bash and Python scripting.
• Experience with CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions or Jenkins.
• Demonstrated experience in building container images.
• Command of at least one container management or orchestration tool, including Docker, Podman, or Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with Linux systems, package management, build systems, release engineering, or artifact pipelines.
• Clear communication skills and a strong sense of end-to-end ownership, encompassing design, review, documentation, operation, and cross team collaboration.
• A commitment to sharing knowledge and fostering the growth of team members.
• A genuine passion for learning and exploring new challenges outside your comfort zone.
• A Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Computer Science, a STEM field, or a similar discipline.
• An exceptional academic track record from both high school and university.
• Business level written and spoken English.
• Strong personal motivation aligned with Canonical's mission.
• Ability to undertake international travel 2-4 times a year for company events, each up to two weeks long.
• 0-7 years of relevant experience.

Canonical Values:

• Precise: Delivering correctness and clarity with care.
• Reliable: Consistently providing high quality work that builds trust and confidence.
• Accessible: Collaborating to create usable products and systems.
• Adroit: Blending enthusiasm, knowledge, adaptability, style, and character.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• A security oriented maintenance mindset: ability to investigate dependency and vulnerability findings, assess their impact, and implement secure fixes.
• Understanding of software supply chain security, with experience in generating and consuming artifacts like SBOMs, signatures, provenance, or CVE reports.
• Familiarity with GitOps principles and workflows.
• Familiarity with additional programming languages such as Go or Rust.
• Hands-on experience building minimal and distroless container images.
• Knowledge of OCI specifications.
• Familiarity with security or compliance frameworks like CIS, NIST, FedRAMP, or DISA STIG.
• Evidence of contributions to open source projects.
• A passion for embedding security across all stages of the engineering lifecycle (DevSecOps), and an interest in using AI or agentic development responsibly and safely.
• Relevant Linux, container, or cloud-native certifications (e.g., CKS or DCA) are a plus.

What Canonical Offers Colleagues:

Canonical offers a compensation package that considers geographical location, experience, and performance, reviewed annually to recognize outstanding contributions. In addition to competitive base pay, we provide a performance driven annual bonus and a range of benefits reflecting our global values and local needs:

• Distributed work environment with twice-yearly in person team sprints.
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year.
• Bi-annual compensation review.
• Company recognition rewards.
• 40 days annual leave per annum, including public holidays and company wide holiday periods.
• Maternity and paternity leave.
• Team Member Assistance Program & Wellness Platform.
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues, with Priority Pass for lounge access.

About Canonical:

Canonical is a pioneering technology firm leading the global adoption of open source. Our Ubuntu platform is widely used in significant enterprise initiatives across public cloud, data science, AI, engineering innovation, and IoT. We serve top public cloud and silicon providers, as well as industry leaders across various sectors. Founded in 2004, Canonical is founder led, profitable, and growing, operating on a worldwide distributed collaboration model with no central headquarters. We uphold high expectations for all colleagues, championing excellence and challenging you to innovate, learn new skills, and elevate your professional game.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer, committed to fostering a workplace free from discrimination. We believe that diversity of experience, perspectives, and background enhances our work environment and products, ensuring fair consideration for all applicants regardless of identity.