Engineering Manager in Belfast

About Stora

Stora is building the operating platform for modern self-storage businesses. Our software helps operators manage bookings, payments, customers, facilities and day-to-day operations from one place, while automating much of the work that traditionally makes running a self-storage business unnecessarily complicated. In just over five years, Stora has grown from an early-stage product into a platform used by more than 500 operators. We’re a product-led, remote-first company with an experienced engineering team and ambitious plans for what comes next.

The Role

This is a genuine people leadership role. You’ll manage approximately 12 engineers working across three product teams, with the team expected to continue growing. Each product team has a Tech Lead responsible for technical direction, alongside Product and Design. Your focus is different: the engineers themselves. This isn’t a role for somebody looking to move away from engineering completely, though. You’ll need enough technical depth to understand the work, follow engineering discussions and ask good questions without needing to be the person making every technical decision. You’ll work closely with our Head of Engineering and have support from People, but you’ll have meaningful autonomy to improve how engineering management works at Stora.

What Else You’ll Own

• Engineering Management
  • Manage engineers across multiple product teams through regular, useful 1:1s, coaching and clear feedback.
  • Make expectations clear and help engineers understand what good performance looks like.
  • Identify performance issues early and handle difficult conversations properly when needed.
  • Support engineers in progressing from junior through senior and beyond.
  • Build strong relationships with engineers without creating unnecessary management overhead.
• Performance & Progression
  • Own the engineering performance and progression approach.
  • Review and improve our existing career levels, expectations and review processes.
  • Make promotion and progression decisions that are consistent, evidence-based and understood by the team.
  • Create a culture where feedback happens throughout the year rather than being saved for formal reviews.
• Hiring & Team Development
  • Own engineering hiring alongside the relevant Tech Leads and wider team.
  • Help define what we need before a search begins, assess candidates properly and maintain a high hiring bar.
  • Ensure new engineers have a structured and useful onboarding experience.
  • Think proactively about team composition, capability gaps and future hiring needs.
• Team Health
  • Pay attention to engagement, retention, collaboration and emerging people issues across the engineering organisation.
  • Work with Tech Leads when team problems sit somewhere between technical delivery, behaviour and team dynamics.
  • Help maintain a strong remote engineering culture as Stora grows.
• Technical Context
  • Stay close enough to the engineering work to understand what the team is solving and the environment they’re working within.
  • Be comfortable reading code, following pull requests and participating intelligently in technical conversations.
  • Partner with Tech Leads without competing with them for technical ownership.

What Success Looks Like

After your first year, we’d expect:

• Engineers to have a clear understanding of what is expected of them and how they can progress.
• Managers and engineers to be having better, more useful conversations about performance and development.
• Performance issues to be addressed early rather than becoming surprises.
• A progression framework that works for the engineering organisation Stora has become, not the company we were several years ago.
• Stronger and more consistent hiring and onboarding.
• The Head of Engineering spending less time acting as the default people manager for the entire engineering organisation.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager, rather than somebody taking their first step into management. You’ll ideally have:

• Previous experience directly managing software engineers across more than one team or product area.
• A strong track record of developing engineers at different stages of their careers.
• Hands-on experience managing performance, including difficult or underperformance situations.
• Experience making promotion and progression decisions.
• Experience running or improving engineering career frameworks, review cycles or progression processes.
• Previous experience hiring software engineers and building effective interview processes.
• An engineering background that allows you to understand code and contribute meaningfully to technical conversations.
• The judgement to know when to get involved and when to leave technical decisions with the Tech Leads.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, particularly in a remote environment.
• A practical understanding of how AI tools are changing software engineering and experience using them in your own work.
• Experience with Ruby or Rails would be useful, but it isn’t essential. We’re much more interested in whether you can lead engineers well.

What This Role Isn’t

It’s worth being clear that this isn’t:

• a Tech Lead role with some people management added on;
• a delivery or project management position;
• a Product Manager role;
• a hands-on engineering role where you’ll spend most of your week writing production code;
• a first Engineering Manager opportunity.

Technical leadership already exists within the product teams. We’re hiring you because engineering management itself deserves dedicated ownership.

Our Technology

You won’t be expected to spend most of your time writing production code, but you should be comfortable working around our stack.

Backend: Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, TimescaleDB

Frontend: Turbo, React, ViewComponents, Sass

Testing: Minitest, Playwright

Deployment: GitHub Actions, Heroku

Salary & Benefits

Salary: Highly competitive and depending on experience

Location: Fully remote within the UK or Ireland

Belfast office: Available for anyone who wants to use it

Private health insurance for you and your family

Company pension

35 days’ annual leave inclusive of applicable public/statutory holidays, depending on location

Learning and development support

Share options

Work-from-home budget

Our Hiring Process

We’re reviewing applications as they arrive rather than waiting for a closing date. If your experience looks like a strong match, we’ll explain the process clearly from the outset and move quickly.

Equal Opportunities at Stora

Stora is an equal opportunities employer. We want to build a workplace where people are treated fairly, with dignity and respect, and where different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives are valued. We welcome applications from suitably qualified candidates regardless of age, disability, gender, gender reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religious belief or political opinion, or sexual orientation. Recruitment and employment decisions are based on merit, competence and business need, and we promote equality of opportunity and fair participation in line with our responsibilities under Northern Ireland equality legislation. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, please let us know.