Senior Engineering Manager (Isolation Layer) - Mistral AI

Mistral provides full-stack AI solutions, partnering with enterprises across finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector to co-create customized AI systems. Their mission is to build a sovereign AI cloud for Europe, ensuring frontier models run on European infrastructure.

About the Team

The Cloud Platform team at Mistral designs and ships the foundational systems for sovereign AI deployments, including compute orchestration, Kubernetes, bare metal, storage, networking, and datacenter fleet management. They operate their own infrastructure, meaning they handle end-to-end troubleshooting and development.

European Compute Units enable enterprises to commit to multi-year capacity on Mistral’s infrastructure, with a goal of scaling to a gigawatt of compute across Europe by 2030. This role involves designing and shipping the critical isolation layer that every sovereign AI deployment depends on.

The Role

This is a people-leadership role from day one. You will manage the team—hiring, coaching, performance, growth paths, and providing honest feedback—while maintaining deep technical engagement. Roughly half your time will be spent on architecture decisions and solving the hardest technical challenges, and the other half on leading your squad.

You will lead the team building sandbox environments for AI agents, which require secure, isolated, network-controlled environments with snapshotting capabilities. These environments must support reinforcement-learning workloads, requiring thousands of concurrent environments with low-latency creation and destruction.

The tension between airtight isolation and fleet-scale, low-latency performance is the core product challenge. Your team’s work will shape the runtime environment for the next generation of AI software.

What You Will Do

• Build the isolation layer using technologies like microVMs, containers, namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, and snapshot/restore mechanisms.
• Own the security boundary, ensuring that customer code—often untrusted—is safely isolated.
• Scale systems to handle fleets of thousands of concurrent environments, focusing on creation latency, density, and lifecycle management.
• Write production-grade Go code and make critical architectural decisions.
• Grow engineers through mentorship, setting high standards for ownership and pushing them beyond their comfort zones.
• Manage all aspects of team leadership, including hiring, performance reviews, growth paths, and feedback.
• Collaborate with Product Managers to translate research needs into shippable primitives.

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years of real people leadership. You must have managed engineers, including hiring, coaching, and providing honest feedback. Hands-on technical contribution is expected, but this role prioritizes the team you build and lead.

• Deep Linux internals expertise, including namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, and virtualization, ideally with experience in microVMs like Firecracker.

• 8+ years of experience building backend or infrastructure systems, with a proven track record of shipping production systems in Go.

• Strong understanding of network isolation at the packet level, beyond just firewall rules.

• Performance instincts with a focus on optimizing syscalls and profiling to ensure high performance.

• Experience partnering with product, design, and business teams to deliver software that reaches real users.

• A low-ego, team-first mindset. Mistral values collaboration and technical leadership that inspires others.