The role of a Community Engineer at Canonical

The Ubuntu Community team at Canonical enables community leaders and participants to get things done in the project, coordinating with Canonical teams and ensuring that community processes are efficient and well run. We don't do the work of the community, but we facilitate that work to ensure that energetic and ambitious community members with their own vision of open source can benefit from the work Canonical does and bring their own flavour of Ubuntu into being, to meet the needs and express the interests of their community.

This is an exciting opportunity for a technically proficient person who is passionate about open source software, Linux, and sustainable community building.

In this role, you will support community initiatives with your technical skills and strong organizational skills. You can get into the trenches with developers to smooth processes and integrate community plans with Canonical plans for maximum impact. You can encourage and facilitate the creation of new technical projects that enhance the community contribution experience, and you can represent community interests to Canonical teams.

You will support and engage with volunteer developers in the Ubuntu community, addressing their concerns and helping them to create successful tools. You will help to ensure their success and the overall autonomy and sustainability of the project. This role is likely a good fit for someone with experience in DevOps, Software Development, Testing or QA, package management, container technology. You will definitely need to be technically skilled with Linux.

You will provide the content and technical support to ensure the community stays engaged and informed. This will include regular blog and social media posts about community initiatives, events, accomplishments, and collaborative efforts between Canonical and the Ubuntu community.

You will communicate effectively with developers and software engineers and represent not only the Ubuntu community but Canonical as a contributor to the wider Linux ecosystem. Our team attends conferences and expos, and talks about technical community projects and their development processes.

Location: This is a Globally remote role.

What your day will look like

• Collaborate proactively with a distributed team

• Write high quality content to promote and support community initiatives

• Discuss ideas and collaborate on finding good solutions to community problems

• Work from home with global travel 2 to 4 weeks for internal and external events

• Potential opportunity to travel more if you wish

• Nurture community contributions to Ubuntu

• Engage with the Ubuntu community through AskUbuntu, IRC, social media, conferences, etc

• Represent Ubuntu via speaking engagements at events and conferences.

What we are looking for in you

• You love technology and working with brilliant people

• You are curious, flexible, articulate, and accountable

• You value soft skills and are passionate, enterprising, thoughtful, and self-motivated

• You have experience with developer tools and open source projects

• You have a clear public record of accomplishments (talks, blog posts, GitHub, Twitter, etc)

• You have interest and experience with two or more of the following: Ubuntu Linux - kernel or userspace, DevOps, software development, testing and QA, package management, container technology

• You can work autonomously and assume full ownership of objectives as needed

• You can be flexible with your time and enjoy working with new technology in a fast-paced environment

• You are experienced working with open source communities and understand the workflow of volunteer contributors

Additional skills that you might also bring

• Experience with community management

• Experience with Developer advocacy

• Experience as a software developer

• Examples of contributions to the Ubuntu Community

• Experience with contributing to open source projects