Software Engineer, Automotive and Industrial Architecture

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 hiring multiple positions from early-career engineers to experienced architects focused on the different dimensions of dependable software: cybersecurity, quality, and safety.

What does it take to bring the world’s open source software into mission-critical systems? At Canonical, we are driving the engineering discipline needed to build secure, reliable, and high-quality products that our automotive and industrial partners can depend on. Ubuntu is already the world’s most widely used Linux distribution in general; we want to make it the world’s best choice for the automotive and industrial sectors too.

We operate at the boundary between upstream open source innovation and the industrial regulatory realities. Our engineers define the concepts, architectures, processes, verification strategies, and certification artifacts to transform a general-purpose platform into a dependable, certifiable foundation for automotive and industrial compute. This is systems-level engineering at scale, requiring precision, rigor, and a deep understanding of how complex software behaves in constrained, regulated environments.

We are looking for engineers and architects who combine an open source hacker and builder mindset with respect for rigorous, standards-driven engineering. You will work across Canonical engineering teams and with leading industrial partners, helping to build this capability from the ground up and shaping how open source enters the most demanding technical domains.

• Translate automotive and industrial cybersecurity, quality and safety standards into actionable engineering requirements and perform gap analyses against current capabilities.
• Drive the creation of structured engineering artifacts, including requirements, traceability models, risk analysis, test strategies, and certification documentation.
• Collaborate with Canonical engineering teams to align development practices with industrial compliance needs.
• Design, implement, and execute verification and validation activities required to qualify Ubuntu and other components for regulated environments.
• Develop and improve automation and tooling to scale traceability, testing, compliance evidence generation, and reporting.
• Engage with industrial partners to understand their expectations, align external expectations and internal capabilities, and support audits and technical reviews.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of Canonical’s internal processes and standards capability as the team scales.

• Strong software engineering foundation with experience in developing complex systems on Linux.
• Professional experience with C, C++, and Python in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience working within automotive, industrial, or other regulated environments governed by safety, cybersecurity, or quality standards (such as ISO 26262, ISO/SAE 21434, IEC 61508, IEC 62443, SOTIF, or (A)SPICE), and applying them in practice.
• Experience in system or software architecture, implementation, or verification and validation of complex embedded systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to produce precise technical documentation.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed team and engage with industrial partners.

• Contributions to open source projects, particularly in the area of Software Defined Vehicles.
• Knowledge of Debian packaging.
• Experience with Rust or safety-critical software development.

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm at the forefront of the global move to open source. As the company that publishes Ubuntu, one of the most important open-source projects and the platform for AI, IoT, and the cloud, we are changing the world of software. We recruit on a global basis and set a very high standard for people joining the company. We expect excellence - in order to succeed, we need to be the best at what we do. Most colleagues at Canonical have worked from home since its inception in 2004.​ Working here is a step into the future and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game.

We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspectives, and background create a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity we will give your application fair consideration.