From product management to engineering leadership: Jon’s career progression at Canonical

Career progression is crucial to employee engagement and retention. Canonical encourages employees to develop their own  personal development journeys, giving them the chance to apply internally for roles they are passionate about even if they come from different technical backgrounds. We have many great examples. Today we will be featuring the story of Jon Seager.

Jon is a VP of Engineering at Canonical. He leads the development of a multi-cloud orchestration tool called Juju, along with a portfolio of operators for driving databases, observability tooling, machine learning operations platforms, telco networks, identity platforms and more.

Jon’s career journey with Canonical

When did you start with Canonical and what was your original role?

I joined Canonical in March 2021 as a Product Lead. The Product Lead role was designed to bring hands-on technical expertise into the Product Management team to provide technical guidance and leadership across various parts of Canonical’s product lines, and provide assistance bootstrapping new engineering efforts where required.

What did you switch to and when?

In May 2021, I took on an interim Engineering Director role leading the same team I run now, which later turned into a full-time VP Engineering role.

What was the reason behind that?

Around that time, a couple of long-serving senior colleagues had left to pursue new challenges, which stimulated a broader reconfiguration of Canonical’s engineering organization, with the goal of putting processes in place that would support our growth in the coming years.

When I joined Canonical, I gravitated immediately toward Juju and our cloud automation products – it’s where I had the most experience, and Juju felt like a different, but fascinating take on the same technical problems I’d been wrestling with for years. My early work included leading efforts to create documentation for the SDK, and presenting live coding workshops at Operator Day 2021 to get people involved in our charm ecosystem. I also began work in various teams to update processes, and create commonality between teams.

The opportunity to take the lead was presented to me by our CEO, and I was excited to take it! I’d had plenty of experience leading teams in past roles, and this felt like an area where I could have real impact.

What was the process and how long did it take? 

While the initial appointment as Interim Engineering Director happened quickly, it was made clear to me that in order to secure the VP of Engineering position on a long term basis, I’d need to apply and compete with other external candidates.

I hadn’t been with the company for very long, so some of my original assessment data was used. I was interviewed by other leads in Engineering, Alliances, HR and Product as part of the process – as well as a final interview with our CEO. 

The role didn’t open until I’d been doing the interim job for around 4-5 months, but once I applied the process concluded within a few weeks. I was officially appointed VP of Engineering in February 2022 (at my very first Canonical Engineering Sprint!).

What advice would you give to readers considering a career at Canonical? 

I would definitely recommend Canonical to others. For me, the focus on open source software is key, and I’m really proud of how technical and engaged our engineering leadership track has remained. I strongly identify with the company’s mission and what it’s trying to achieve with its products – whether the “customer” is a student at a school using Linux for the first time, a small startup building out their business, or a large corporation sustaining global software operations at scale.

Join the team 

Career progression is an area that Canonical puts a lot of attention into and Jon’s story is evidence of that. In the next article of this series, we’ll explore another example. In the meantime, browse current openings to find the most interesting role for you and apply. Remember, your first role at Canonical needn’t be your last.