Senior Engineering Manager

Description

About Mistral

Mistral provides full-stack AI solutions: from frontier models to developer tools, applications, and compute. We partner with enterprises tackling the hardest problems across high-stakes industries like finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector, co-creating customized AI systems that they can run on their terms.

We are a dynamic, collaborative team passionate about AI and its potential to transform society. Our diverse workforce thrives in competitive environments and is committed to driving innovation. Our teams are distributed between Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

The team

Mistral is building a sovereign AI cloud for Europe. Customers in finance, healthcare, and the public sector run frontier models on European-jurisdiction infrastructure, and the IaaS group builds the layer they stand on: Kubernetes, networking, and storage, running on our own bare metal.

European Compute Units let enterprises commit to multi-year capacity on that infrastructure, and we are scaling toward a gigawatt of compute across Europe by 2030. The org hires about ten engineers a month, and this group carries one of the largest shares.

Responsibilities

• You will lead three teams: Managed Kubernetes, Network, and Storage. Managed K8s and Network run today, each with its own lead. Storage is yours to build: charter, first lead, first hires, first systems in production. The group is about a dozen engineers today and roughly doubles this year.
• Your reports are team leads. The work is direction, staffing, and the seams between the teams: where Kubernetes meets the network, where both meet storage, and where the group meets the metal underneath. You stay technical enough to challenge architecture calls and to know when to trust the people making them.
• This is a second-line seat for an engineer who moved into management to build world-class organisations. Opportunities like this don’t come up often.
• Own delivery and health across three teams' roadmaps. Projects ship with the reliability that finance, healthcare, and public-sector workloads demand.
• Manage and grow team leads. Set the standard, hold it, and grow the ones who want your seat one day.
• Build the Storage team from zero: define its charter (object and block storage, capacity planning, tiering, backup), hire its lead and engineers, and put the first systems into production.
• Own the seams: architecture that crosses Kubernetes, network, and storage, and the boundary with the fleet and hardware-design groups below you.
• Partner with Product Managers to set priorities and make the tradeoffs between what customers need now and what the platform has to become.
• Hire. Your group carries a big block of the org's openings; you build the machine that fills it and onboards people fast.
• Raise the engineering bar through mentoring, feedback, and the standard your leads copy.

Requirements

• You have led multiple engineering teams in production infrastructure as a second-line manager. Managing managers, running several teams at once, is the experience we need.
• Your ground is orchestration: you have run Kubernetes or compute orchestration at real scale, shipped systems in Go, and worked on Linux itself, below the managed-service layer.
• You know network and storage well enough to challenge specialists and tell a sound design from a lucky one.
• You are comfortable next to hardware. This group runs on Mistral's own metal, and you will work with the fleet and hardware teams every week.
• You have built a team from nothing: written the charter, made the first hires, shipped the first system.
• You have grown leaders, not only engineers. People you managed now run teams of their own.
• A low-ego, team-first mindset.

Benefits

• We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Benefits vary by country and may include healthcare coverage, parental leave, retirement plans, relocation support, wellness programs, meal and transportation allowances, and other location-specific perks.
• For the most up-to-date details on benefits available in your location, please refer to our Benefits page .