Engineering Manager, Storage

Mistral AI is hiring an Engineering Manager, Storage in Paris, France. Level rates it ; you can apply on Mistral AI.

Level's read on this job

Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
Tools and skills the posting cites include Go, S3 and engineering management.
Level classifies it as a lead role.
Level lists 234 other open roles at Mistral AI.

AI in this role

Lead the founding storage engineering team building infrastructure for sovereign AI cloud workloads.

GoS3

engineering-managementstorage-systemsinfrastructuredistributed-systems

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 datacenter fleet that runs it all.

We run it all on our own metal, our own network, our own datacenters — 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.

You will be the founding EM for storage on our Sovereign AI 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 datacenters 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 datacenters 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.

Privacy Policy

Your privacy matters to us. You can learn more about how we handle your personal data in our Applicant Privacy Policy.

How we rate this

Engineering Manager, Storage at Mistral AI rates 80 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Engineering Manager, Storage is an open job at Mistral AI.
Level rates this role AI Level 4 of 4: Builds AI.
The role is based in Paris.
The job was posted on September 23, 2026.
Seniority: lead.
Applications are handled by Mistral AI. Apply on Mistral AI

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Engineering ManagementStorage SystemsInfrastructureDistributed SystemsGoS3

Questions you could be asked

Tell me about a project where engineering management was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where storage systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Walk me through how you've used Go in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: Engineering Management, Storage Systems, Infrastructure, Distributed Systems, and Go. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.

Get your CV reviewed before you apply

Send your CV and the role you want next. Your review arrives by email within 3 days.

Get a free CV review Check your resume with the ATS resume checker