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Mistral is building a sovereign AI cloud for Europe, providing full-stack AI solutions from frontier models to developer tools and compute infrastructure. The Cloud Platform team builds the systems that enable customers in finance, healthcare, and the public sector to run frontier models on European-jurisdiction infrastructure.
This is a founding people-leadership role for the Storage team. You will build the team from zero while being hands-on on the hardest technical problems. There is no legacy to maintain—you design both the team and the storage stack.
You will own the complete storage layer for Mistral's cloud: block, filesystem, and object storage for training runs, sandboxed workloads, and general compute. You will make build-vs-buy decisions, deploying and hardening best-in-class vendor platforms where appropriate and writing custom services in Go where they matter most. This includes S3-compatible object storage, tiering, backup and recovery, and caching layers. You will own capacity planning across datacenters and the architecture that ensures data durability across disk, network, and site failures.
Key responsibilities include standing up the storage stack for training, sandbox, and general compute workloads; making technical and business tradeoffs on build-vs-buy decisions; owning the data plane including allocation, duplication, tiering, and backup/recovery; planning petabyte-scale capacity across datacenters and failure domains; building and coaching the team from inception; and partnering with Product Managers on the storage roadmap.
As the team grows, your role will shift toward people leadership, with you controlling the pace of that transition. Storage is a strategic bet for the organization—the team you build and decisions you make will define how a gigawatt of European compute stores its data.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 2+ years of real people leadership: you have managed engineers, hired, coached, given honest feedback, and grown them
- 8+ years building backend or infrastructure systems
- Built storage systems (object, block, or distributed filesystems), not just operated them; deep understanding of failure modes like mid-write disk failures and rebalance/backup collisions
- Deep distributed-systems fundamentals: durability, consistency, replication, erasure coding, failure domains
- Shipped production systems in Go (C++ or Rust engineers ready to write Go daily are welcome)
- Comfortable with hardware reality: HDD, SSD, NVMe tiers and their economics
- Partnered with product, design, and business teams to ship software that reached real users
- Low-ego, team-first mindset; technical force that other engineers want to work alongside
