Engineering Manager, Quality Engineering

Hi I’m Nikolay, leading the technical organization at StorPool. How do you feel about building quality not just as a gate, but as an intrinsic part of developing a world-class distributed storage system? What if engineers owned product decisions, and your primary role wasn’t chasing tickets, but coaching them to navigate complexity and deliver excellence? If that blend of deep technical quality leadership and people empowerment sounds compelling (and maybe a little daunting), read on. I’m looking for an Engineering Manager with a strong background in quality engineering to help us scale our engineering organization at StorPool.

Why StorPool Engineering is Different

StorPool wasn’t started because “software-defined storage” was a buzzword – it wasn’t yet, back in 2011. It was started because customers repeatedly told us storage was their biggest problem: too complex, too expensive, and very difficult to scale. Over 10 years later, StorPool is one of the few cash-flow positive, self-funded storage vendors in the world and growing. This wasn’t luck; it was about tackling a genuinely hard technical problem with a determined, expert team focused on a clear vision: all data storage should run on a multitude of standard servers (distributed), controlled by intelligent storage software. We believe this is technically and economically the best way – How Storage Should Be.

This journey fundamentally shaped our engineering culture. It’s built on:

• Deep Ownership: We believe engineers thrive when they own problems end-to-end. In our world of complex distributed block storage, this demands deep technical understanding and genuine customer empathy – considering the real impact on the companies building clouds on top of our platform.
• Pragmatic Results: Being self-funded and profitable means we focus relentlessly on building real, lasting value, not just chasing the next funding round or vanity metrics. We overcome obstacles and deliver solutions that make customers genuinely successful and happy.
• Continuous Improvement: We are driven by the belief that we can always get better, every single day. This applies equally to our cutting-edge product and our internal processes and infrastructure. We constantly challenge assumptions and push the limits of what’s possible in storage technology.

Your role

Your mission is to lead and grow a team of engineers dedicated to ensuring the rock-solid quality, reliability, and performance of StorPool’s distributed storage platform – arguably the fastest and most efficient software-defined storage solution on the market today. This isn’t about managing a separate QA silo performing checks at the end; it’s about embedding quality thinking, practices, and automation throughout the entire engineering lifecycle.

This role requires a blend of three key areas, with a distinct emphasis on leveraging your quality engineering expertise:

• People Leadership (~40-50%): Your core focus is coaching engineers to reach their full potential. This involves managing performance rigorously but fairly through regular feedback and deep reviews, fostering meaningful career growth (including actively transferring specialized knowledge currently held by only a few experts), defining effective team onboarding processes, and ensuring team well-being and motivation.
• Team Leadership (~20-30%): You’ll ensure your team delivers impactful results by providing crucial product context about how solutions are used and their expected impact. You’ll manage execution, dependencies, and risks (such as key person dependencies), drive continuous process improvement (especially in testing and quality), define and track team OKRs and metrics, and play a key role in hiring exceptional talent.
• Technical Contribution – Quality Focus (~30%): You will remain hands-on, spending up to 30% of your time writing and reviewing code and RFCs, particularly those related to testing frameworks, automation, and infrastructure. You’ll leverage your deep QA background to help define a technical vision for testing infrastructure. You might initially take on complex process execution, such as parts of the release cycle, to gain a deep understanding before improving or delegating. Your technical credibility in the quality domain is essential.

Why You Should or Shouldn’t Apply

Engineering Leadership comes in many flavors, not all of which fit our model. I thought I’d outline some things I’m looking for to help you decide if this fits what you’re looking for:

You Should Apply If:

• You have a strong technical background in Quality Engineering, testing infrastructure, and test automation development, ideally with experience in systems software, storage, networking, or distributed systems.
• You’re passionate about building and developing high-performing engineering teams, and you have a clear vision of what excellence looks like in quality-focused engineers. You know how to recruit and grow them.
• You excel at coaching and mentoring engineers, helping them grow their technical and problem-solving skills, take on more ownership, and navigate complex challenges.
• You hold yourself and your team to an exceptionally high standard of quality and performance, and you don’t shy away from providing direct, constructive feedback, even to top performers.
• You enjoy staying technically engaged, contributing via code, reviews, and technical strategy (within the ~30% scope), especially in the quality and testing domain.
• You are an excellent and empathetic communicator, capable of facilitating change, navigating different perspectives, and aligning teams towards common goals.
• You resonate with our mission to build genuinely better storage solutions that solve significant customer problems, and you appreciate the stability, focus, and long-term perspective of a profitable, self-funded company.

You Shouldn’t Apply If:

• You prefer a purely hands-off management role and don’t enjoy coding, reviewing code, or engaging deeply in technical strategy and problem-solving.
• You see your primary role as making the final technical or product decisions rather than empowering and coaching your team to make the best calls.
• You believe that rigorous quality processes inevitably slow things down too much or that ‘good enough’ is an acceptable standard for core infrastructure software where data integrity is paramount.
• You think standard agile ceremonies (like sprint planning meticulously managed by the EM) are essential for any team’s success at scale; we value flexibility and engineer-driven processes.
• You’re primarily looking for the rapid scaling, high-burn environment often found in VC-backed startups, rather than a stable, profitable, product-focused company building for the long term.

• You view staff or principal engineers primarily as architects detached from code or project managers, rather than deep technical contributors, mentors, and drivers of technical excellence.
• You’re not optimistic or convinced that we can maintain a high-ownership, high-quality engineering culture as we grow, believing that standard, more restrictive processes are inevitable.

What We’re Building at StorPool

Data fuels everything today. Any human activity generates and relies on vast amounts of important data. Improving data storage, management, and security leads to a better world and a better life – that’s our core belief. Yet, traditional enterprise storage often remains a major bottleneck – complex, expensive, inflexible, and difficult to manage at scale.

StorPool Storage replaces outdated SANs, all-flash arrays, and other inefficient storage products. We developed our block-level, distributed storage software from the ground up to be arguably the fastest and most efficient software-defined storage solution on the market. It leverages standard servers, turning them into a shared storage system that delivers:

• Extreme Performance: Latency often under 100 microseconds (<100μs) and capable of millions of IOPS per cluster. We’re so efficient, physics (network/drive latency) is often the main latency contributor.
• Massive Scalability: Scale from tens of terabytes up to 60 petabytes (60PB) in a single cluster, adding capacity and performance linearly and non-disruptively.
• Bulletproof Reliability: End-to-end data integrity algorithms ensure the data written is the data read back, regardless of hardware/software issues. We offer 99.999% uptime (five-nines availability), including maintenance, often delivered as a fully managed solution with 24/7 monitoring.
• Agility & Integration: Runs on standard servers and Linux distributions (Oracle Linux, RHEL clones, Ubuntu, Debian). Features an API-first design, QoS, instant snapshots, backup/DR capabilities, and deep integrations with cloud platforms like OpenNebula, CloudStack, OpenStack, OnApp, and Kubernetes.

We do all this to fulfill our mission: make outstanding storage easily available to companies building clouds, at scale, making storage simpler and more affordable. We help cloud builders construct smarter, more efficient clouds, boosting their margins and enabling innovation. We genuinely believe we are creating a better world through better storage.

We have happy customers in over 30 countries across 4 continents, strong revenue growth, profitability, years of runway, and a clear, long-term vision focused on technical excellence and customer success.

Ready for the Challenge?

If this sounds like the challenge and environment you’re looking for, I’d love to hear from you. Please apply and tell us a bit about why you think you’d be a great fit for this specific Engineering Manager role focused on Quality Engineering, and for StorPool’s unique culture.