Head of Talent Development

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 building a Talent Development function that is future focused and driven to define the future of the workplace, within a global, growing open source software company,  pioneers in remote-first collaboration and employment. 

This is an opportunity for a person with outstanding leadership, organisation and intellect, to build our Talent Development team to enhance our leadership and people management practices in our remote setting. We are now 1,200+ colleagues across 75+ countries. We would like to create a new team to focus on Talent Development - to deepen our insights and effectiveness as a remote-first and globally distributed organisation.

We know that being effective remotely requires discipline and good habits, and we would like to invest in the research needed to understand that, the training and policymaking which enables it, and the selection mechanisms that ensure consistency of behaviours. We'd like to understand what really makes a distributed, remote-first workplace work. We think we're pretty good at this, remote-first for almost 20 years, but we know there is a lot still to understand, and the frontier of possibility continues to move outward. We'd like to invest in research, analytics and tooling which raises the bar even further for remote collaboration, organisation and leadership. Most importantly though, we'd like to invest in training and multi directional communications to ensure that our leadership team is consistent in setting and maintaining expectations, driving desired team practice and behaviors, as well as expected management practices are effectively embedded across the company . 

This role is the fourth remaining Lead role in our People function, which is a  cross-disciplinary group of organisational psychologists, engineers, statistics / analytics experts, talent science and employee relations specialists. We are recruiting globally, and believe we are bringing in outstanding new colleagues in a way that is fearlessly global. Naturally, they come from a wide range of backgrounds, norms and experiences, and our goal in setting up the Talent Development team is simply to lead the leaders to a position of consistent clarity on who we are, how we roll, and how that changes over time.