I'm new, also running UbuntuTouch 16.04 as of this morning.

I'm wondering why this doesn't work 'out of the box', we have a /etc/init.d/ssh and it's active for the run levels we want. I've spent some time trying to trace this, without luck.

The standard hack is to put stuff in /etc/rc.local, so that's what I did in the end (service ssh start).