TL;DR: We’re seeking a deeply technical Engineering Manager to lead teams building Cloudsmith 2.0, the operating system for the modern software supply chain. You should have operated at senior, staff, or principal engineering depth, and be able to reason through complex production systems with strong engineers.
The Role
As a technical Engineering Manager, you’ll report to the VP of Engineering and lead one or more teams working on Cloudsmith’s core platform. This role is a management role with a high technical bar, requiring you to read production code, challenge technical designs, and manage distributed systems across services and data stores.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership
* Lead teams building systems for artifact record, policy control, and package delivery.
* Shape technical direction with Principal Engineers, Product, Design, and Security.
* Challenge weak designs, unclear ownership, hidden coupling, and over‑complexity.
* Raise the bar on design review, planning, operational readiness, and incident learning.
* Help teams balance customer value, delivery speed, architecture, and reliability.
Team Leadership
* Hire, coach, and continuously develop strong engineers.
* Develop a peer relationship with Principal Engineers and technical leaders.
* Build teams with high trust, high standards, and clear ownership.
* Create clear expectations, decision‑making guidelines, and technical judgment.
* Maintain high standards through clear expectations and direct, honest feedback.
Execution & Delivery
* Own delivery from discovery through implementation, release, and operation.
* Break ambiguous work into clear milestones, risks, dependencies, and trade‑offs.
* Right‑size team process to improve predictability without adding undue overhead.
* Keep customer impact, reliability, and trust visible in engineering decisions.
* Ensure teams build software that is secure, observable, performant, and maintainable.
Required Experience, Qualities & Skills
Technical Depth
* Significant experience as an Engineering Manager, Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or equivalent.
* Strong background in backend, platform, infrastructure, distributed systems, cloud‑native SaaS, developer tools, or security infrastructure.
* Experience designing or operating high‑throughput, database‑backed production systems, preferably distributed or at large scale.
* Strong debugging and performance instincts for slow queries, hot paths, queue backlogs, cache behavior, network issues, deploy risk, and incidents.
* Comfortable with API design, data modeling, async processing, relational databases, analytical stores, object storage, tenancy boundaries, and failure modes.
* Able to read production code and challenge technical decisions.
Cloud‑Native Infrastructure
* Experience with AWS, containers, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability.
* Familiarity with Python, Django, Postgres, ClickHouse, AWS, ECS, CloudFront, Kinesis, Lambda, Terraform, React, and Next.js.
* Experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, CDC pipelines, indexing systems, search infrastructure, analytics stores, or metadata enrichment is valuable.
* Experience with package registries, artifact storage, object storage, caching, CDNs, proxying, edge delivery, or high‑volume HTTP systems is especially useful.
Software Supply Chain & Security
* Experience in devtools, DevOps, CI/CD, artifact management, package management, platform engineering, or enterprise SaaS.
* Security mindset around trust boundaries, policy enforcement, provenance, auditability, authentication, authorization, signing, tokens, and secrets.
* Interest in package identity, upstream trust, metadata quality, policy decisions, malware risk, dependency control, and delivery at scale.
Management & Communication
* Proven track record of hiring, coaching, and developing strong engineers.
* Comfortable working with senior and principal engineers as peers.
* Clear written and verbal communication in a remote‑first environment.
* Good product sense. Focus on customer outcomes and platform quality.
Cultural Values We're Looking For
* Technical humility: strong opinions, loosely held, balanced with sound judgment.
* Builder mindset: close to the work, even when not acting as an individual contributor.
* High standards and low ego: raise the bar while respecting others' ideas.
* Calm under pressure: good judgment for incidents, ambiguity, and hard conversations.
* Clear thinking: turn messy problems into decisions and trade‑offs.
* Ownership: care that the team is healthy and customers can trust what we ship.
Impact & Opportunity
This role helps shape the engineering organization behind Cloudsmith 2.0 and builds the infrastructure that records, governs, and delivers software artifacts at scale.
Growth & Development
Strong fit for someone who wants to grow into executive engineering leadership while leading teams and influencing company strategy, architecture, product direction, and operational excellence from startup scale to public company.
Benefits, Location & Work Environment
* Position based in Ireland or the United Kingdom.
* Competitive compensation package, including equity.
* Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
* Generous annual leave and flexible working policies.
* Professional development budget for conferences and training.
* Opportunities to shape a fast‑growing company building critical infrastructure.
* Regular travel may be required for team meetings, planning, customers, and events.
Health and Wellness
We care about the health and wellness of our people and their families, offering generous annual leave, health and wellbeing benefits, and flexible family‑friendly working policies.
Personal Growth
Opportunities to grow alongside strong colleagues with support for equipment, training, books, conferences, travel, and certifications.
Facilities
Headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with fully equipped office space for sessions, planning, meetups, and team activities. We rely on Slack, Google Docs, Linear, and other tools to collaborate across locations.
About Equal Opportunity
Cloudsmith is an equal‑opportunity employer that welcomes applications from individuals of all races, genders, and ethnicities. We do not discriminate on the basis of age, religion, sexual orientation, citizenship status, military service, or health conditions.
The Final Word
We’re looking for someone who can lead people and still speak engineering fluently. This highly technical leadership role is for someone who moved into management without losing their engineering edge and can build healthy teams, raise technical standards, and help strong engineers do their best work.
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