Founding Storage Engineering Manager

Mistral AI; Paris; On-site; EUR 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Mistral AI in Paris is seeking a founding engineering manager for storage on our Sovereign AI cloud. You will build the storage stack—block, file, object—and lead a growing team from day one while shaping the underlying architecture and strategy.

You will hire engineers, define growth paths, partner with product teams, and decide when to build or buy. This role blends hands-on work with leadership in a high-stakes, innovative setting.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of real people leadership.
• Experience building storage systems (object, block, or distributed filesystems).
• Deep distributed-systems fundamentals: durability, consistency, replication, erasure coding.
• Shipped production systems in Go.
• Comfort with HDD, SSD, and NVMe tiers and their economics.
• 8+ years building backend or infrastructure systems.
• Partnered with product, design, and business teams to ship software that reached real users.
• Low-ego, team-first mindset.

Responsibilities

• Stand up the storage stack — block, file, object — for training and general compute workloads.
• Make the build-vs-buy calls: deploy and harden vendor platforms; write Go services where needed.
• Own the data plane: allocation, duplication, tiering, backup and recovery, S3-compatible APIs.
• Plan capacity across datacenters and failure domains — petabytes, not terabytes.
• Build the team from zero: hire first engineers, onboard and coach them, define growth paths.
• Partner with Product Managers to shape the storage roadmap and tradeoffs.

Skills

People leadership

Go programming

Distributed storage

Backend infrastructure

Capacity planning

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Mistral AI in Paris is seeking a founding engineering manager for storage on our Sovereign AI cloud. You will build the storage stack—block, file, object—and lead a growing team from day one while shaping the underlying architecture and strategy.

You will hire engineers, define growth paths, partner with product teams, and decide when to build or buy. This role blends hands-on work with leadership in a high-stakes, innovative setting.