Telco Field Engineering Director
Canonical
Hirezar Summary for South African Applicants
This remote ok full time position at Canonical is open worldwide, so South Africans can apply. 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>This is an opportunity to run the worldwide Telco Field Engineering business, 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. The Telco department is composed of three regional teams (APAC, EMEA and AMER). </p>
<p>We believe that Engineering Directors 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The role of a Telco Field Engineering Director at Canonical</strong></p>
<p>The Field Engineering department 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. </p>
<p>Within the Field Engineering department, there are multiple focused teams : the Cloud/DC team, the Alliances/Partners team, the IoT team, and the Telco team. </p>
<p>The telco industry is moving to software-defined services. This transformation is driven by open source software, cloud computing and the move to VNF / CNF approaches. Canonical Ubuntu is a key platform for telco innovation, and we are growing our team of specialists who work in the industry to accelerate the change.</p>
<p>Canonical enables operators and communications service providers to embrace this new world, with a focus on platforms such as Ubuntu, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, and reusable, high quality automation for operations at scale.</p>
<p>A Cloud Field Engineering Director is responsible for driving the strategy in presales and delivery for our telco customers. 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.</p>
<p><strong>Location: </strong>This role will be home based, managing teams in worldwide.</p>
<p><strong>What your day will look like</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>Lead and develop managers and teams of Field engineers in the areas of Presales and Professional Services</li>
<li>Solve customer problems by promoting our technologies and being a trusted advisor</li>
<li>Work remotely in a single major time zone</li>
<li>Coach, mentor, and offer career development feedback</li>
<li>Identify and measure team health indicators</li>
<li>Implement disciplined engineering processes</li>
<li>Represent your team and product to stakeholders, partners, and customers </li>
<li>Develop and evangelise great engineering and organisational practices</li>
<li>Plan and manage progress on agreed goals and projects</li>
<li>Be an active part of the leadership team, collaborating with other leaders</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>What we are looking for in you</strong></p>
<ul>
<li>A thorough technical understanding of the telco NFVi (VIM), NFVO, VNFM and MEC space and key telco cloud infrastructure technologies like CPU Pinning, NUMA, SR-IOV, DPDK, etc<br>Familiarity with telco architecture and industry standards<br>Working knowledge of at least one of the following domains: Mobile Packet Core (4G/5G), Private Network, Radio Access Network (RAN), Voice, IP Backbone, VAS or OSS/BSS</li>
<li
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 →