Performance Engineer - Open Source

Canonical is a leading provider of open‑source software and operating systems to the global enterprise and technology markets. Our platform, Ubuntu, is 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 1,000+ colleagues in 70+ countries and a very small number of office‑based roles. Teams meet two to four times yearly in person, at interesting locations around the world, to align on strategy and execution.

The company is founder‑led, profitable and growing. There is a new career path for Performance Engineers who bring exceptional clarity to software performance, correctness and efficiency. These roles exist on every engineering team and the central performance engineering team drives shared tools, dashboards, measurement frameworks, analytical capabilities and skills.

We call this career focus “percorr” because the same deep insights that enable sophisticated performance measurement and design also enable teams to improve their harnesses and frameworks for correctness. Understanding the application, runtime, compiler and system architecture—down to the CPU—provides engineers the ability to think creatively about what to measure and how to verify correctness. Performance engineers often improve the deepest and trickiest areas of our test harnesses, unlocking teams to test and measure previously "dark" aspects of their work.

Teams work with major silicon vendors and cloud providers, focusing on performance optimisation across the stack for each architecture, CPU family or hypervisor. The goal is to ensure Ubuntu users can select whatever platform they want for their workloads while having the best performance and efficiency across the stack from kernel to codec.

Performance and correctness engineers may move between products every two years, raising the bar across a range of products and bringing fresh eyes to processes, harnesses, dashboards and code. Our leaders are truly exceptional individuals who set expectations of change, share insights and skills, and run initiatives and programs.

This role is for perfectionists and precision artists. Whether you focus on C, C++, Rust, Golang, Python, Java, Flutter‑Dart or other languages, or you love the kernel, hardware or CPU instruction set, this career path lets you exploit your precision, rigor, insight and drive.

Location: Teams exist in every time zone, and we accommodate applications from almost any country.

Nice‑to‑have skills we value

• Low‑level CPU insights and assembly language – cache, registers, vectorisation, memory
• Kernel performance insights – scheduling, context switching, hardware acceleration
• Distributed systems performance insights – tracing, debugging
• Compiler‑level performance insights – profile‑guided optimisation, inlining, assembler
• Runtime performance insights – Golang, Python, JVM, NodeJS
• Database performance evaluation – plans, indexing, data modelling, tracing, monitoring
• Web browser performance insights – JS, web frameworks, tracing, CSS
• Performance measurement tooling – profiling, eBPF, D‑Trace, flamegraphs
• Benchmarks and performance measurement tools – Phoronix Test Suite, others
• Test harnesses and capabilities in C, C++, Rust, Python, Golang, NodeJS, JavaScript

The role entails

• Drive software performance and correctness in a specific project
• Collaborate with colleagues and community worldwide
• Work on shared tools and infrastructure for performance measurement, analysis and reporting
• Teach, train and develop performance skills within the team
• Strengthen test capabilities, harnesses and pipelines
• Analyse systems and code to understand performance and scalability
• Solve problems directly or through influence, leadership and skills development
• Review code and technical designs

What we are looking for in you

• Exceptional academic track record from high school and university
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or Physics
• Demonstrable personal initiatives to measure and improve performance, efficiency and correctness in code
• Confidence to speak up, give and receive feedback, and share ideas
• Track record of exceeding expectations to achieve outstanding results
• Leadership and commitment to skills development and mentorship
• Passion for technology evidenced by personal projects and initiatives
• Strong work ethic and confidence to thrive with motivated colleagues
• Professional written and spoken English with excellent presentation skills
• Experience with Linux (Debian or Ubuntu preferred)
• Excellent interpersonal skills, curiosity, flexibility, and accountability
• Appreciation of diversity; polite and effective in a multi‑cultural environment
• Thoughtful and self‑motivated
• Result‑oriented, with personal drive to meet commitments
• Ability to travel internationally twice a year for company events up to two weeks long

What we offer

• Distributed work environment with twice‑yearly team sprints in person
• Personal learning and development budget of USD 2,000 per year
• Annual compensation review
• Recognition rewards
• Annual holiday leave
• Maternity and paternity leave
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues
• Priority Pass and travel upgrades for long‑haul company events

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer. We are proud to foster a workplace free from discrimination. Diversity of experience, perspective and background creates a better work environment and better products. Whatever your identity, we will give your application fair consideration.