Cloud Professional Services Manager

Remote from
🌐 Anywhere
Annual salary
Undisclosed
Salary information is not provided for this position. Check our Salary Directory to estimate the average compensation for similar roles.
Employment type
Full Time,
Job posted
Apply before
21 Aug 2026
Experience level
Midweight
Views / Applies
51 / 2

About Canonical Ltd.

Trusted open source for enterprises

Actively Hiring
Verified job posting
This job post has been manually reviewed for authenticity and compliance.

AI Summary

This role involves leading a Professional Services team at Canonical, helping customers implement open source cloud solutions. The manager will oversee engineers, engage in technical presales, and drive project delivery. Candidates need deep knowledge of cloud technologies like Kubernetes and OpenStack, along with strong leadership and communication skills. The position is remote, requiring the ability to manage a team across a time zone. Canonical seeks dynamic individuals passionate about open source and developing engineering talent.

Role DNA

Job Complexity
Easy Hard
Pace & Pressure
Relaxed Fast-paced
Autonomy Level
Guided Full Ownership
Communication Load
Independent Highly Collaborative
AI Insight This role demands a combination of advanced technical expertise in cloud computing and proven leadership skills to manage and develop engineers, while also contributing to presales and strategic initiatives.

Salary Analysis

Median Highly Competitive
$165,000
US Market
$130k – 200k
0 $220k
AI Insight The salary for this position is not explicitly provided, but based on US market data, the typical range for a Cloud Professional Services Manager is $130,000 to $200,000 annually, with a median around $165,000. This is competitive for the level of responsibility and technical leadership required.

Dear Hiring Team,

I am excited to apply for the Cloud Professional Services Manager position at Canonical. With over 8 years of experience in cloud architecture and team leadership, I have a proven track record of delivering complex open source solutions to enterprise clients. My expertise spans Kubernetes, OpenStack, and Linux, and I am passionate about mentoring engineers to achieve their best.

I thrive in dynamic environments and have successfully led presales engagements and managed remote teams across multiple time zones. Canonical's mission to simplify open source for businesses aligns perfectly with my professional values.

I look forward to the opportunity to contribute to your team and help drive innovation in cloud computing. Thank you for considering my application.

Can you describe your experience managing a team of cloud engineers? How do you balance technical guidance with people management?
I have managed teams of 5-10 cloud engineers for the past 4 years. I ensure regular 1-on-1s to discuss career goals and provide technical mentorship through code reviews and design discussions. I also involve myself in technical presales and project delivery to stay hands-on.
How would you approach a situation where a customer's requirements are outside the scope of Canonical's standard solutions?
I would work with the customer to understand their core needs and identify if there's a customization path using open source components. If not, I'd collaborate with product teams to assess feasibility and potentially create a roadmap item, while managing customer expectations transparently.
Describe your experience with Kubernetes in production environments. What challenges have you faced?
I have deployed and managed Kubernetes clusters for multiple clients, including upgrades, scaling, and security hardening. Common challenges include networking configuration, storage integration, and ensuring high availability. I prioritize automation and monitoring to mitigate risks.
How do you foster a culture of continuous learning and technical growth within your team?
I encourage team members to pursue certifications, host internal tech talks, and allocate time for exploring new tools. I also mentor junior engineers through pair programming and constructive code reviews, and recognize achievements publicly.
Can you walk me through a time you handled a difficult technical presales conversation?
I once had a prospect skeptical about open source support. I demonstrated Canonical's SLA-backed services, shared case studies of similar deployments, and arranged a proof-of-concept that resolved their performance concerns. The deal closed successfully.

This is an opportunity to run a Professional Services team (also known as Field Engineering) team, helping customers understand and implement Canonical’s open source solutions in public clouds and in their own data centers. We work across the entire spectrum of cloud offerings, from Ubuntu itself to virtualisation and private cloud, Kubernetes, and the implementation of sophisticated open source solutions such as MLops platforms, data platforms and more. We are rapidly expanding the range of open source solutions we offer and deliver to customers, as we move into new industries like telco, finance, health care and media we design and develop new open source solutions to meet their needs.

We believe that Engineering Managers should be outstanding engineers themselves. They should feel completely at home troubleshooting technical issues and having technical presales conversations with customers. They should contribute to project delivery themselves, but know that the technical contributions they bring are far less significant than their ability to shape the whole team’s direction, focus and delivery. We grow management skills and train engineers, who are interested in soft skills, to be managers.

We believe that open source is just starting to transform the tech sector and enterprise compute. Our goal is to make open source easier, more reliable and more secure for deployment and development. We strive to be the provider of ‘most software to most companies’. To deliver on that ambition, our engineers are carefully selected from the applicants across the globe. We select for brilliance and motivation to take open source to the next level. Our engineering managers help teams achieve more than they realised they could, and feel proud of the result.

The role of a Cloud Professional Services Manager at Canonical

The Field Engineering team is our team of cloud solutions architects at Canonical, working directly with our customers, designing private and public cloud solutions fitting their workload needs. The portfolio of products includes on-premise cloud solutions such as Openstack, MicroCloud and Ceph, and solutions that could be deployed either on-premises or in public clouds such as Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Spark, PostgreSQL, etc. The team works hands-on with the technologies by deploying, testing and handing over the solution to our support or managed services team at the end of a project. Managers and team members also take part in presales conversations to provide technical advice during the sales process. 

A Cloud Professional Services Manager is responsible for line management and career guidance. The ability to develop engineering talent, to represent your team from a technical perspective, and to drive collaboration with other teams and customers are all critical to success in this role. You are also expected to actively participate in technical presales to help our department achieve our quarterly goals.

Location: This role will be home based, managing a team in your time zone.

What your day will look like

  • Lead and develop a team of engineers, ranging from graduate to senior
  • Work remotely in a single major time zone
  • Coach, mentor, and offer career development feedback
  • Identify and measure team health indicators
  • Implement disciplined engineering processes
  • Represent your team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers 
  • Develop and evangelise great engineering and organisational practices
  • Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects
  • Be an active part of the leadership team, collaborating with other leaders

What we are looking for in you

  • Knowledge of cloud computing concepts & technologies, such as Kubernetes, Openstack, AWS, GCP, Azure, Ceph, etc.
  • Practical knowledge of Linux and networking
  • Experience in technical presales
  • You are a dynamic person who loves to jump in new projects and interact with people
  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English
  • Passion and a track record of developing and growing people
  • Experience in leading, coaching and mentoring engineers
  • Organised and able to ensure your team delivers timely, high quality results
  •  An exceptional academic track record from high school and, preferably, university as well
  •  Willingness to travel up to 25% of the time. Field Engineers attend internal company events, external tech events and customer meetings.

Additional skills that you might also bring

  • Second language – Spanish or French preferred
  • Python knowledge
  • Experience collaborating with external partners
  • Experience collaborating with several internal teams and providing stakeholder feedback for engineering roadmaps

What we offer you

We consider geographical location, experience, and performance in shaping compensation worldwide. We revisit compensation annually (and more often for graduates and associates) to ensure we recognise outstanding performance. In addition to base pay, we offer a performance-driven annual bonus. We provide all team members with additional benefits, which reflect our values and ideals. We balance our programs to meet local needs and ensure fairness globally.

  • 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
  • 40 days annual leave per annum, including public holidays and our All Company holiday periods
  • Maternity and paternity leave
  • Employee Assistance Programme
  • Opportunity to travel to new locations to meet colleagues from your team and others
  • Priority Pass for travel and travel upgrades for long haul company events

About Canonical

Canonical is a pioneering tech firm that is 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 on a daily basis. 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.

Canonical has been a remote-first company since its inception in 2004.​ Work at Canonical is a step into the future, and will challenge you to think differently, work smarter, learn new skills, and raise your game. Canonical provides a unique window into the world of 21st-century digital business.

Canonical is an equal opportunity employer

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.

 

#LI-remote 

Apply now >

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