Head of Security Operations

Canonical is hiring a Head of Security Operations to lead the team that defends one of open source's most influential companies and shapes the security of the global Ubuntu community. This is a full-time leadership position open to candidates based in the United States.

About the Role

As Head of Security Operations at Canonical, you will direct the SecOps team that owns the strategy, tooling, and policies protecting Canonical's data, internal infrastructure, and build pipelines. Reporting to the CISO, you will architect the controls that automatically detect, contain, and resolve threats, while feeding hard-won operational insight back into Canonical's product security and software development practices. Although this is a management role, we expect our leaders to remain expert practitioners — setting the standard through hands-on work and judging quality from genuine experience. Your remit also extends outward: strengthening the resilience of the wider open source ecosystem through threat intelligence sharing, public talks, and participation in industry governance.

Key Responsibilities

• Recruit, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of technical security specialists
• Establish Canonical's SecOps standards, playbooks, and KPIs, and track performance against them
• Own the architecture and continuous improvement of the Security Operations Center (SOC)
• Assess Canonical's security posture and select, deploy, and automate new tooling and practices
• Lead detection, containment, and remediation of cyber attacks and active threats
• Run threat modelling, tabletop exercises, and incident response across Engineering, IS, and the wider company
• Build SecOps learning materials and publish blog posts, whitepapers, and conference presentations
• Advance Canonical's thought leadership and contribute to open source threat intelligence efforts
• Deliver work within Canonical's agile engineering framework and influence change with security leadership

Qualifications

• Demonstrated success defending against advanced and nation-state threat actors
• Deep, ground-up expertise in SOC architecture — logging, firewalls, network segmentation, honeypots, and more
• Expert command of Linux security and market-leading security tooling
• Ability to define, automate, and measure effective incident response playbooks
• Hands-on experience consuming and contributing to threat intelligence feeds
• Familiarity with risk management frameworks such as NIST CSF
• Strong academic record, ideally a Computer Science or STEM degree, or a compelling alternative path
• Excellent business English writing, presentation, and leadership skills, with accountability for metric accuracy
• Valued extras: offensive or defensive security backgrounds, open source security tools, ISO 27001, and endpoint posture management

About Canonical

Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the leading open source operating system for the cloud, IoT, and enterprise. Its security work protects millions of users worldwide and contributes directly to the safety of the broader open source community.

How to Apply

To apply, complete your application directly on this page, or you'll be redirected to the employer's application platform to finish submitting there.