This is an opportunity to run the worldwide Telco Field Engineering business, helping customers understand and implement Canonical's open source solutions in public clouds and in their own data centers. We work across the entire spectrum of cloud offerings, from Ubuntu itself to virtualisation and private cloud, Kubernetes, and the implementation of sophisticated open source solutions such as MLops platforms, data platforms and more. The Telco department is composed of three regional teams (APAC, EMEA and AMER).
We believe that Engineering Directors should be outstanding engineers themselves. They should feel completely at home troubleshooting technical issues and having technical presales conversations with customers. They should contribute to project delivery themselves, but know that the technical contributions they bring are far less significant than their ability to shape the whole team’s direction, focus and delivery. We grow management skills and train engineers, who are interested in soft skills, to be managers.
We believe that open source is just starting to transform the tech sector and enterprise compute. Our goal is to make open source easier, more reliable and more secure for deployment and development. We strive to be the provider of ‘most software to most companies’. To deliver on that ambition, our engineers are carefully selected from the applicants across the globe. We select for brilliance and motivation to take open source to the next level. Our engineering managers help teams achieve more than they realised they could, and feel proud of the result.
The role of a Telco Field Engineering Director at Canonical
The Field Engineering department is our team of cloud solutions architects at Canonical, working directly with our customers, designing private and public cloud solutions fitting their workload needs. The portfolio of products includes on-premise cloud solutions such as Openstack, MicroCloud and Ceph, and solutions that could be deployed either on-premises or in public clouds such as Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Spark, PostgreSQL, etc. The team works hands-on with the technologies by deploying, testing and handing over the solution to our support or managed services team at the end of a project. Managers and team members also take part in presales conversations to provide technical advice during the sales process.
Within the Field Engineering department, there are multiple focused teams : the Cloud/DC team, the Alliances/Partners team, the IoT team, and the Telco team.
The telco industry is moving to software-defined services. This transformation is driven by open source software, cloud computing and the move to VNF / CNF approaches. Canonical Ubuntu is a key platform for telco innovation, and we are growing our team of specialists who work in the industry to accelerate the change.
Canonical enables operators and communications service providers to embrace this new world, with a focus on platforms such as Ubuntu, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, and reusable, high quality automation for operations at scale.
A Cloud Field Engineering Director is responsible for driving the strategy in presales and delivery for our telco customers. The ability to develop engineering talent, to represent your team from a technical perspective, and to drive collaboration with other teams and customers are all critical to success in this role. You are also expected to actively participate in technical presales to help our department achieve our quarterly goals.
Location: This role will be home based, managing teams in worldwide.
What your day will look like
1. Lead and develop managers and teams of Field engineers in the areas of Presales and Professional Services
2. Solve customer problems by promoting our technologies and being a trusted advisor
3. Work remotely in a single major time zone
4. Coach, mentor, and offer career development feedback
5. Identify and measure team health indicators
6. Implement disciplined engineering processes
7. Represent your team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers
8. Develop and evangelise great engineering and organisational practices
9. Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects
10. Be an active part of the leadership team, collaborating with other leaders
What we are looking for in you
11. A thorough technical understanding of the telco NFVi (VIM), NFVO, VNFM and MEC space and key telco cloud infrastructure technologies like CPU Pinning, NUMA, SR-IOV, DPDK, etc
Familiarity with telco architecture and industry standards
Working knowledge of at least one of the following domains: Mobile Packet Core (4G/5G), Private Network, Radio Access Network (RAN), Voice, IP Backbone, VAS or OSS/BSS
12. Knowledge of cloud computing concepts & technologies, such as Kubernetes, Openstack, AWS, GCP, Azure, Ceph, etc.
13. Practical knowledge of Linux and networking
14. Experience in technical presales
15. You are a dynamic person who loves to jump in new projects and interact with people
16. Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English
17. Passion and a track record of developing and growing people
18. Experience in leading, coaching and mentoring engineers and managers
19. Organised and able to ensure your team delivers timely, high quality results
20. An exceptional academic track record from high school and, preferably, university as well
21. Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time. Field Engineers attend internal company events, external tech events and customer meetings.
Additional skills that you might also bring
22. Second language - Spanish or French preferred
23. Python knowledge
24. Experience collaborating with external partners
25. Experience collaborating with several internal teams and providing stakeholder feedback for engineering roadmaps
26. Understanding of AI and machine learning concepts, including sovereign AI, and their potential applications in telco environments, such as network optimization, predictive maintenance, unified communication, and customer experience improvement
27. Exposure to frameworks such as 3GPP, TM Forum ODA, eTOM, ETSI NFV, ONAP, O-RAN, or similar is a plus
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.
28. Distributed work environment with twice-yearly team sprints in person
29. Personal learning and development budget of USD 2, per year
30. Annual compensation review
31. Recognition rewards
32. Annual holiday leave
33. Maternity and paternity leave
34. Employee Assistance Programme
35. Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues from your team and others
36. Priority Pass for travel and travel upgrades for long haul company events