Engineering Manager, Storage in London

About Mistral

Mistral provides full-stack AI solutions: from frontier models to developer tools, applications, and compute. We partner with enterprises tackling the hardest problems across high-stakes industries like finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector, co-creating customized AI systems that they can run on their terms. We are a dynamic, collaborative team passionate about AI and its potential to transform society. Our diverse workforce thrives in competitive environments and is committed to driving innovation. Our teams are distributed between Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

The team

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 datacentre fleet that runs it all. We run it all on our own metal, our own network, our own datacentres — 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.

The Role

This is a founding people-leadership role. There is no team to inherit and no legacy to maintain — you build the team as well as the stack, and you are accountable for both from day one. Early on you will be deliberately hands-on, because there is no one else to solve the hardest problems — but hiring your first engineers, coaching them, and setting their growth paths starts immediately, not later. If you are looking for a senior IC role, this is not it. You will be the founding Engineering Team Lead for storage on our cloud. Block, filesystem, and object storage for training runs, sandboxed workloads, and general compute: you decide what we build, what we buy, and how it adds up to storage our customers can bet a business on. Some layers we deploy and harden from best-in-class vendors. The ones that matter most we write ourselves in Go — S3-compatible object storage, tiering, backup and recovery, caching layers that put cold data on cheap spinning disks. As the team grows, the balance shifts toward people leadership, and you decide how fast. You will own capacity planning across datacentres and the architecture that keeps data durable when disks, networks, and entire sites fail. Storage is a strategic bet for this org: the team you build and the calls you make will define how a gigawatt of European compute stores its data.

What You Will Do

• Stand up the storage stack — block, file, object — for training, sandbox, and general compute workloads.
• Make the build-vs-buy calls: deploy and harden vendor platforms where they win; design and write our own services in Go where they don't.
• Own the data plane: allocation, duplication, tiering, backup and recovery, S3-compatible APIs.
• Plan capacity across datacentres and across failure domains — petabytes, not terabytes.
• Build the team from zero: make the first hires, onboard and coach them, own performance and growth paths, and set the standard for ownership.
• Partner with Product Managers to shape the storage roadmap and make the technical and business tradeoffs.

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 built storage systems — object, block, or distributed filesystems — not just operated them. You know what happens when a disk dies mid-write and when a rebalance collides with a backup window.
• Deep distributed-systems fundamentals: durability, consistency, replication, erasure coding, failure domains.
• You have shipped production systems in Go. Systems engineers coming from C++ or Rust who are ready to write Go daily should still talk to us.
• You are comfortable with hardware reality: HDD, SSD, and NVMe tiers, and the economics of each.
• 8+ years 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.

What we offer

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Benefits vary by country and may include healthcare coverage, parental leave, retirement plans, relocation support, wellness programs, meal and transportation allowances, and other location-specific perks. For the most up-to-date details on benefits available in your location, please refer to our Benefits page.