Engineering Manager in Belfast

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.

About Cloudsmith: Cloudsmith is building the operating system for the modern software supply chain. We run a global, fully managed, multi-tenant SaaS platform that helps organizations manage, secure, govern, and distribute software artifacts at scale. Our customers use Cloudsmith as critical infrastructure for CI/CD, developer workflows, security controls, compliance, and software distribution. We support 30+ formats across languages, containers, and operating systems. We recently raised our Series C to accelerate Cloudsmith 2.0: deeper artifact intelligence, stronger policy and provenance, faster package-aware delivery, and infrastructure built for engineering teams, as well as the modern AI-driven software factory.

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. We need someone who can read production code, challenge technical designs, follow a distributed system across services and data stores, and spot operational risks before they turn into problems. You should be technical enough to earn trust in architecture, design, and operational discussions with senior and principal engineers.

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, & 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 clarity around expectations, decision-making, & technical judgment. Maintain high standards via clear expectations and providing direct, honest feedback.
• Execution & Delivery: Own delivery from discovery through implementation, release, and operation. Break ambiguous work into clear milestones, risks, dependencies, & 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, & 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 our stack is useful: 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 would be 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 communicator in a remote‑first environment. Good product sense. You care about 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 IC.
• High standards, low ego: Raise the bar while respecting the ideas/opinions of others.
• Calm under pressure: Good judgment for incidents, ambiguity, and hard conversations.
• Clear thinking: Turns messy problems into decisions and trade-offs.
• Ownership: Cares 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. AI is increasing the rate at which software is created and changed. Enterprises need stronger controls, better provenance, clearer trust decisions, and a faster path to delivery. You’ll help build the infrastructure that records, governs, and delivers software artifacts at scale.

Growth & Development: This role is a strong fit for someone who wants to grow into executive engineering leadership. We’re looking for someone who can lead teams today, but also wants to understand company strategy, architecture, product direction, operational excellence, and how great engineering organizations are built, from startup scale through to public companies.

Benefits, Location & Work Environment: You must be based in Ireland or the United Kingdom and have the right to work independently without requiring sponsorship. A competitive compensation package, including equity. With comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance. Plus, generous annual leave and flexible working policies to suit your lifestyle. Including a professional development budget for conferences and training. In a dynamic, innovative, trust‑centric, and supportive work environment. Belfast HQ, used for working sessions, planning, all‑hands, and team events. Opportunity to help 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. Sustainable pace matters. We offer generous annual leave, health and wellbeing benefits, and flexible family‑friendly working policies.

Personal Growth: You will have room to grow alongside strong colleagues. We support professional development through budgets for equipment, training, books, conferences, travel, and certifications.

Facilities: Cloudsmith is headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with fully equipped office space for working 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, proud to nurture a diverse workplace 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. We will not tolerate discrimination of any kind.

The Final Word: We’re looking for someone who can lead people and still speak engineering fluently. This role is a highly technical leadership role for someone who moved into management without losing their engineering edge. We’re looking for someone who can build healthy teams, raise technical standards, and help strong engineers do their best work.