Fantastic place to work if you love Linux and open source - Software Engineer Canonical Employee Review

5.0
Nov 16, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

When I was applying to Canonical, some of the negative reviews here and on other company review sites were admittedly concerning to me, so I wanted to come back here after almost a full year of employment to note that my experience has been entirely positive. As someone passionate about operating system software development, my role at Canonical is nothing short of a dream role, complete with work that I enjoy, major opportunity for upward growth, teammates that are a pleasure to work with, and very fun travel and career development opportunities. Having a day-to-day experience like this that contributes directly to the world's most widely used operating system for servers is extremely rewarding as well, since I know that my work has a major impact on the global compute infrastructure. If you are a prospective applicant, specifically one who is passionate about advancing Linux and open source software in a big way, Canonical is full of incredible opportunities for you. I'm extremely glad I was not swayed away from this opportunity by concerning reviews. My advice would be to pay attention to your experience with the interview process - for me, despite everything I had heard about it, it consisted exclusively of very interesting conversations about topics I am passionate about with people I was excited by the process of working with - which is precisely the experience that I have had since joining.

Cons

Some growing pains due to time it takes to hire appropriate candidates

Explore other reviews about Canonical

5.0
Apr 18, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

very good. happy so far

Cons

could be better, like the time of application to final round

2.0
May 23, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Met some interesting people, had some interesting conversations.

Cons

Was constantly hearing bad stories about upper management. I only experienced the CEO expressing minor annoyance and paranoia a couple of times. My line manager always seemed to be treading water, fixated on dev-ops ceremonies, and didn't respect the opinions of his peers. The guy who was the "expert" for my field practised management by spreadsheet and was completely out of his depth, always obsessing about his approach to the work and inflicting his opinion on everyone else. Spent too much time having to plan for travel or hear about everyone's travel plans. Wasted so much time in the company's ongoing recruitment drive which pushes most of the work of interviewing and filtering candidates onto regular employees.

3
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