Distributed Systems Testing Software Engineer, Python / Go
Canonical
Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants
This remote ok full time position at Canonical is open across the EMEA region, which includes South Africa. As a remote position, you can work from anywhere in South Africa — whether you're based in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, or a smaller town.
Job Description
<p>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.</p>
<p>The company is founder-led, profitable, and growing.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are hiring a <strong>Software Engineer for Distributed Systems Testing</strong> with a passion for building and validating resilient distributed systems. You drive the success of those leveraging Canonical’s Ubuntu and Juju to build multi-cloud deployable applications. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">We see quality engineering as a first class engineering practice and are looking for people who can bring deep engineering insights and a data driven approach to testing, test automation, reporting and data analytics.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Distributed Systems testing team at Canonical is responsible for the high quality of Canonical’s Cloud solutions based on for example Juju, Terraform, OpenStack, or Kubernetes. Systems are tested and deployed under highly diverse conditions, from bare metal in customer data centers to public clouds such as AWS, GCE, Azure.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a software engineer you will have the opportunity to develop CI pipelines which power Canonical’s cloud integration testing and reporting. You will help test our products on new clouds and advance our AI/ML pipelines for automatic analysis of test results. A successful candidate is interested in tackling these problems, as well as imagining and leading new initiatives within the team and across Canonical.</span></p>
<h1><strong>The role entails</strong></h1>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Creating automated testing approaches and infrastructure for validating reliability, performance, and resilience of cloud orchestration tools and applications </span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Enabling engineering teams across Canonical to develop software with confidence by making distributed system testing tooling available across the company</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Enhancing continuous integration pipelines for deploying and testing Canonical’s cloud native products such as Kubeflow</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Deploying, managing, and debugging highly distributed systems on clouds and bare metal</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monitoring and reporting on automated testing efforts</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Collaborating daily with a globally distributed team</span></li>
</ul>
<h1><strong>What we are looking for in you</strong></h1>
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Solid background in modern test processes and strategies</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with Python or Go development</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strong object oriented development skills</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Working knowledge of continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Knowledge of networking technologies and fundamentals</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Solid understanding of the Linux system architecture</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Complex abstract thinking</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2-4 weeks of international travel travel per year</span></li>
</ul>
<h1><strong>Nice-to-have skills</strong></h1>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ability to develop and ship modern production grade web applications</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ability to operate data platforms: key-value stores, relational or document databases, event buses</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Data collection and analytics skills for large multidimensional datasets</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Experience with AI/ML pipelines</span></li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">
Tips for South African Applicants
Timezone Advantage
South Africa (SAST, UTC+2) overlaps well with European business hours and has a few hours of overlap with US East Coast. Mention your timezone flexibility in your application.
Salary in Context
Even without a listed salary, international remote roles typically pay 2-3x more than equivalent local positions in South Africa due to the exchange rate advantage.
Application Tips
Tailor your CV to international standards — use a clean format, highlight remote work experience, and include your English proficiency. Many SA applicants succeed by emphasising their strong work ethic and cultural adaptability.
Load Shedding Preparedness
If you're applying for a remote role, having a backup power solution (UPS, inverter, or generator) and mobile data as a backup internet connection shows employers you're prepared for South Africa's infrastructure challenges.
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About Canonical
Canonical is a company in the Operations industry that hires remote workers from South Africa. They currently have 230 open positions on Hirezar. View all Canonical jobs →