Engineering Team Lead, Managed K8s

Mistral

9d•Remote

About The Position

Mistral is building a sovereign AI cloud for Europe. Our customers in finance, healthcare, and the public sector run frontier models on European-jurisdiction infrastructure, and the Cloud Platform team builds the systems that make that possible — compute orchestration, Kubernetes, bare metal, storage, networking, and the datacenter fleet that runs it all. We run it all on our own metal, our own network, our own datacenters — which means when something breaks, the fix is ours to write. 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. You will design and ship the layer every sovereign AI deployment depends on and shape the team building it.

Requirements

2+ years of real people leadership. You have managed engineers — hired, coached, given honest feedback, and grown them.
Hands-on contribution matters here, but this role is judged on the team you build and lead, not just the code you write.
You have shipped production systems in Go. Not dabbled. Shipped.
You have run Kubernetes in anger — and ideally built parts of it: operators, schedulers, controllers.
You understand what happens underneath it, and you have worked on Linux directly, not just on managed services that sit on top of it.
You have run GPU workloads on Kubernetes, or you are confident you can own that domain fast.
You think like a developer who happens to build infrastructure, not an operator who manages it.
You write code other engineers depend on.
Extensive experience building backend or infrastructure systems.
You have partnered with product, design, and business teams to ship software that reached real users.
A low-ego, team-first mindset. We care less about your exact domain and more about whether you are the kind of technical force other engineers want to work alongside.

Responsibilities

Design and ship the control plane. You build alongside your team and own the architecture and the hardest implementation decisions — scheduling, operators, provisioning, node lifecycle.
Grow the engineers, not just the software. You set the standard for ownership, remove the obstacles in their way, and coach them past their comfort zone until the work they ship surprises them.
Own the reliability of the Kubernetes control plane. It is the team's headline KPI. You make the calls when it breaks at 3am, and your engineers learn from how you do it.
Shrink the distance from metal to on-demand. Provisioning a cluster should be minutes of automation, not weeks of tickets.
Partner with Product Managers to set priorities, scope initiatives, and make the technical and business tradeoffs.
Own people management for the team: hiring, performance, growth paths, and honest feedback — the leadership work that never becomes someone else's job.
Define the team's processes and execution rituals as it grows.