In all of the positions listed below, you will be leading the documentation efforts of a team. You will need strong hands-on software skills, including some programming skills. The technical author job advertisement has more detail about general requirements.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: a good grasp of data engineering and science software; an understanding of data governance principles; familiarity with software packaging and distribution.

You will: lead development of documentation for Canonical's own business process software and automation; work closely with users of that software; work with Juju and the charmed application ecosystem.

Our analytics products include charmed versions of KubeFlow, Airflow and Temporal.

Time zones: EMEA, APAC, AMER

You need: machine learning and data science expertise; familiarity with data operations and infrastructure; a working grasp of cloud infrastructure operations.

You will: become an expert user of our analytics products; work closely with colleagues in the Juju/charms ecosystem to establish good documentation patterns; work with upstream maintainers.

We provide versions of multiple database and data-related products as ready-to-integrate charms (packages) for the Juju ecosystem. Canonical data platform.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: a working grasp of cloud infrastructure operations; familiarity with databases (SQL, NoSQL) and data technologies (analytics, data stream processing); to be up-to-date with data industry trends.

You will: become an expert user of our data products; work closely with colleagues in the Juju/charms ecosystem to establish good documentation patterns; be a public advocate for our charmed data products.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: embedded firmware experience; a grasp of Linux kernel concepts; familiarity with low-level Linux system interfaces; exposure to embedded firmware build systems.

You will: focus on enabling improvements to Canonical's embedded portfolio, expanding the classes of devices we can target; help to nurture Ubuntu Core's adoption in the low-end embedded Linux spectrum; work closely with R&D colleagues.

Time zones: EMEA, APAC, AMER

You need: to understand the landscape of enterprise IT; to have hands-on familiarity with cloud infrastructure and automation; to be able not just to manage the tension between urgent customer needs and long-term documentation plans, but use them to improve both.

You will: work at the intersection of field engineering, product engineering and product management; drive customer perspectives into product teams' documentation perspectives; assert and establish documentation practices in field engineering's ways of working.

Juju is an application and infrastructure orchestration engine.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: expertise in Kubernetes and other cloud technologies; good familiarity with DevOps, system administration and observability practices.

You will: become an expert Juju user; drive the integration of Juju's documentation with that of Ubuntu Pro, Livepatch and Landscape; be a public advocate for Juju.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: a working grasp of reliability and observability practices; familiarity with Kubernetes; to have a grasp of concepts in telemetry and time-series data.

You will: become an expert user of our observability products; work closely with colleagues in the Juju/charms ecosystem to establish good documentation patterns; be a public advocate for our charmed observability products.

Time zones: EMEA, AMER

You need: real-world, hands-on public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) expertise; clear insight into industry cloud trends.

You will: become an expert on cloud deployment of Ubuntu and other Canonical products; work directly with our public cloud partners; be an advocate for Ubuntu on public cloud platforms.

Ubuntu as a robotics platform

Time zones: EMEA

You need: a good grasp of the industrial robotics landscape; to understand key issues in software packaging, delivery and security at scale; have familiarity with products such as ROS.

You will: help create a unified picture of a very large application landscape; work closely with colleagues in teams such as security and stores to develop good documentation patterns; be a public advocate for Ubuntu in robotics.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: to be gregarious, open-minded and take broad, pragmatic perspectives on software and its users; to be able to share and communicate those perspectives; to manage conversations in which disparate needs and expectations are represented.

You will: lead the development and maintenance of the large body of internal documentation that informs the day-to-day work of our sales teams; ensure that insights from perspectives from sales and potential customers are used to improve technical product documentation.

Time zones: EMEA, APAC, AMER

You need: security, packaging, kernel hardening expertise; solid programming skills; clear insight into open-source software industry realities.

You will: help drive a security-first mindset across Canonical engineering teams; work with bug-finders, reporters, and upstream software maintainers; help fly the flag for open-source security values across the industry.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: to be a security expert – or near-expert – who really cares about how standards turn into real-world benefits; to have solid programming skills; to be able to bring your technical insights and customer perspectives together.

You will: become a hands-on expert user of our security tools and products; establish effective patterns for public security communication for the whole of Canonical; work directly with enterprise customers to inform their understanding of our products.

Time zones: EMEA, AMER

You need: software packaging experience; a grasp of Linux kernel concepts; familiarity with Linux security features including AppArmor, cgroups, seccomp.

You will: drive developer experience improvements in a core Ubuntu technology, wherever you can find them; work with the Ubuntu Core, Starcraft, Support and Store teams on shared objectives; engage with the extensive Snap open-source community.

Time zones: AMER

You need: an excellent understanding of cloud software operations; familiarity with the software components in Canonical's cloud stack (OpenStack, LXD, Juju and charms); an ability to work across teams to improve processes, tools and elevate our ways of working.

You will: work with tools such as SalesForce Delivery Cloud and Jira; drive the integration of support tooling generally; work with colleagues not just in Support but elsewhere in the organisation to ensure that lessons learned and improvements made in one place are applied in others.

Time zones: AMER

You need: a good grasp of the industrial devices landscape; familiarity with Ubuntu and Snap; an ability to work across teams to improve processes, tools and elevate our ways of working.

You will: work with tools such as SalesForce Delivery Cloud and Jira; drive the integration of support tooling generally; work with colleagues not just in Support but elsewhere in the organisation to ensure that lessons learned and improvements made in one place are applied in others.

Time zones: EMEA

You need: software packaging experience; a grasp of Linux kernel concepts; familiarity with Linux security features including AppArmor, cgroups, seccomp.

You will: ensure that key industrial customers can build, adapt, maintain and troubleshoot their products; help to nurture Ubuntu Core's adoption in the broader open source community; work closely with colleagues in the Snap/Ubuntu core ecosystem to set common standards and patterns in documentation.

There are multiple roles with different focuses for Ubuntu Desktop, including GNOME, gaming, enterprise.

Time zones: EMEA, AMER

You need: to be an expert, enthusiastic, fully engaged user of Ubuntu Desktop; a strong understanding of a Linux distribution's architecture, components and specifications; hands-on expertise with Debian packaging and configuration.

You will: develop your skills to top flight expert sysadmin level; lead the modernisation of our Ubuntu documentation, in collaboration with colleagues in other teams; work closely with our community team to ensure that documentation serves our community goals effectively.

Join our team

Before you apply, we encourage you to read How to get a job at Canonical.

We have a rigorous hiring process for Technical Authors. Once your application is processed, you will be invited to complete a written interview, covering numerous aspects of your career, work in and thoughts on documentation and your education. Stages along the way include:

The written interview is an important part of the process. It’s reviewed - anonymously, in an effort to remove bias - by multiple members of the team.

This has several benefits. One is that in-person interviews are stressful experiences, while a written interview gives you all the time you need to gather your thoughts and put them together in a way that presents you at your best. It’s a good opportunity to say things that might not otherwise come up later.

It’s also excellent preparation for the interviews that will come. We want to see your best, and for you to be prepared for them. And we want them to be a good experience for you too.

Our written interviews are used by all the future in-person interviewers you’ll meet. When you do meet them, they’ll already have had a good introduction to you, so that you don’t need to repeat the same stories and explanations to multiple people.

Candidates who progress will face up to three interviews with Technical Author peers, covering:

• Skills and experience: What have you done? What do you know? What can you do?
• Insight and understanding: How do you think about documentation and its challenges? What ideas have you formed, about practice, process and product? How deep is your thinking?

Next is an interview with someone from our Talent Acquisition team, that looks back at your career, discusses how you work and want to work, and considers questions like salary, availability to start and so on.

Not strictly an interview, but an opportunity to demonstrate your ability to think through and solve documentation problems (and it’s not a writing test; we already know you can write). We want to see how you approach issues such as meeting user needs and documentation structure, and your analytical and critical skills.

An interview to confirm our assessments and work out the next steps, based on your interests, skills and experience. This will help us arrange interviews with appropriate hiring managers in different teams.

By this stage, we’d like to have you as a Technical Author at Canonical, and now it’s a question of finding the right team or project for you, where both we and you feel that you’ll be excited by the technology and in a strong position to make a valuable contribution.

That is indeed a lot of interviews. It’s an in-depth process for an exacting role and we take it very seriously.

Don’t forget that you are interviewing us as much as we are interviewing you. We want you to be an active participant in the process, not just someone who answers our questions.  

You will spend a large proportion of your life each day at work. We, as much as you, want to be sure that you're in the right place, one where you will be successful, fulfilled and happy.