Senior/Tech Lead Backend Engineer (Managed Kubernetes) (opens in a new tab) Amsterdam · Berlin · United Kingdom

Nebius Group; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Career growth and learning

Flexibility and ownership

Collaborative and innovative culture

Impactful AI projects

International environment

Job summary

Nebius is building a cloud AI platform and seeks a senior staff engineer to lead the mk8s Core team from Amsterdam. You’ll own the API and control plane, drive cluster autoscaling, and integrate platform components while starting as an individual contributor to gain context before taking on management responsibilities.

You’ll mentor 4–8 engineers, shape the technical roadmap, and partner with Product to align vision with execution.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering or management experience.
• Experience leading multi-month technical projects and engineering teams.
• Proven ability to own multi-month technical initiatives and deliver results.
• Strong background in building scalable backend systems and architectures.

Responsibilities

• Lead by example, dedicating significant time to IC work: coding, code reviews, project leadership, and on-call incident handling.
• Manage 4–8 mid-to-senior engineers, provide context, coaching and regular feedback.
• Maintain the technical vision for your area of responsibility and ensure alignment with product goals.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager and Service Owner to shape product vision and delivery plans.

Skills

Golang

Team leadership

Software engineering

Mentoring

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

About Nebius:

Nebius is leading a new era in cloud infrastructure for the global AI economy. We are building a full-stack AI cloud platform that supports developers and enterprises from data and model training through to production deployment, without the cost and complexity of building large in-house AI/ML infrastructure.

Built by engineers, for engineers. From large-scale GPU orchestration to inference optimization, we own the hard problems across compute, storage, networking and applied AI.

Listed on Nasdaq (NBIS) and headquartered in Amsterdam, we have a global footprint with R&D hubs across Europe, the UK, North America and Israel. Our team of 1,500+ includes hundreds of engineers with deep expertise across hardware, software and AI R&D.

Nebius Managed Kubernetes (mk8s) mission is to grow the Nebius cloud platform by providing a Kubernetes-native way to run AI systems with high efficiency and low operational overhead.With a single click, it provides a Kubernetes cluster on top of Nebius services for compute (VMs) and networking.In 2026, the service is scaling 10× and is expected to manage customer workloads across tens of thousands of GPU servers in more than 10 data centers.

You will lead the mk8s Core team, one of three mk8s teams. The Core team owns the API, the core of the service control plane, cluster autoscaling, platform integrations, and running k8s add-ons.

At Nebius, team leads are hands-on. We expect you to be a senior or staff engineer now (or earlier in your career). You will start as an individual contributor to gain context, then take on managerial responsibilities.

In this position, you will be responsible to:

• Lead by example. Set the quality bar by spending a significant portion of your time on IC work: writing and reviewing code, leading projects, and participating in on-call rotation, incident mitigation, and post-incident analysis.
• Manage 4–8 mid-to-senior engineers. Provide context, coach, and give regular feedback.
• Maintain the technical vision for your area of responsibility.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager and Service Owner to shape product vision and plans.

Examples of outcomes you could drive as a Team Lead

• Optimize the service control plane to create and manage 20K GPU nodes in a single Kubernetes cluster, enabling a major contract for the company.
• Integrate cluster autoscaling approaches (e.g., Karpenter) to improve resource utilization and support seamless auto-upgrades.
• Provide a Kubernetes-native way to use local disks to reduce disk I/O bottlenecks for AI training and inference, improving efficiency.
• Deliver managed Layer 7 load balancers to reduce operational overhead for customers.

What you will bring to the table:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering or management experience
• Excellent knowledge of Golang, or you are ready to quickly switch to this programming language
• Expertise with
  • Multi-month technical projects
  • Tech leading engineers
  • Owning multi-month technical projects.

It would be an added bonus if you had:

• Experience with Team management, Kubernetes administration, Developing Kubernetes controller.

#LI-ET3

Benefits & Perks:

• Competitive compensation
• Career growth and learning opportunities
• Flexibility and ownership
• Collaborative and innovative culture
• Opportunity to work on impactful AI projects
• International environment and talented teams

What's it like to work at Nebius:

Fast moving- Bold thinking- Constant growth- Meaningful impact- Trust and real ownership- Opportunity to shape the future of AI

Equal Opportunity Statement:

Nebius is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace and to providing equal employment opportunities in all aspects of employment. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the country in which they apply and will be required to provide proof of employment eligibility as a condition of hire.

If you need accommodations during the application process, please let us know.