Senior Engineering Manager (Kubernetes) - Mistral AI

This is a people-leadership role from day one. You will manage the team — hiring, coaching, performance, growth paths, honest feedback — while staying close to the code: roughly half your time in architecture decisions and the hardest technical problems the team faces, the other half leading your squad.

You will own our Kubernetes product end to end: a metal-to-on-demand platform built on in-house infrastructure, with GPU support for training, inference, and general-purpose compute.

Kubernetes is our product, not just our platform — we run it on infrastructure we own end to end. You will decide how the control plane scales, how GPUs get scheduled, and how quickly a rack of bare metal becomes an on-demand cluster a customer can use. The decisions you make here shape how our infrastructure scales from today's footprint to a gigawatt of compute across Europe by 2030, and how we turn frontier AI research into production systems used by millions.

This is a role for an engineer who leads from the front because that is where the work is, not because management was the next rung on the ladder.

What You Will Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

• 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.