Site Reliability Engineer, Lead

About Mistral 

At Mistral AI, we believe in the power of AI to simplify tasks, save time, and enhance learning and creativity. Our technology is designed to integrate seamlessly into daily working life.

We democratize AI through high-performance, optimized, open-source and cutting-edge models, products and solutions. Our comprehensive AI platform is designed to meet enterprise needs, whether on-premises or in cloud environments. Our offerings include le Chat, the AI assistant for life and work.

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 France, USA, UK, Germany and Singapore. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

Join us to be part of a pioneering company shaping the future of AI. Together, we can make a meaningful impact. See more about our culture on https://mistral.ai/careers.

Role Summary 

We are seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to drive our infrastructure team in their mission to build a reliable, fault tolerant and scalable infrastructure. You will be responsible for ensuring the reliability of sites in critical distributed environments and improving how our customers interact with our core products.

Reporting line: Head of Engineering

Location: 🇫🇷 🇬🇧 🇩🇪 🇪🇸

What you will do

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer, you balance team supervision, project management, day-to-day operations on production systems with long-term software engineering improvements to reduce operational toil and foster the reliability, availability, and performance of these systems.

Team Leadership (33%)

• Empower Your Team: act as a facilitator and orchestrator, removing obstacles and fostering an environment where your team can focus on creating impactful solutions.

• Thought Leadership: support your team by delivering great experiences while hiring, onboarding, and all-around elevating your people.  

• Project planning (roadmap, deadlines, task allocation...)

• Collaborating with stakeholders (engineering, science, product management…)

Operations (33%)

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, highly available and fault-tolerant infrastructures to support our web services and ML workloads

• Make sure our platform, inference and model training environments are always highly available and enable seamless replication of work environments across several HPC clusters

• Operate systems and troubleshoot issues in production environments (interrupts, on-call responses, users admin, data extraction, infrastructure scaling, etc.)

• Implement and improve monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems to ensure optimal system performance and minimize downtime

• Implement and maintain workflows and tools (CI/CD, containerization, orchestration, monitoring, logging and alerting systems) for both our client-facing APIs and large training runs

• Participate occasionally in on-call rotations to respond to incidents and perform root cause analysis to prevent future occurrences

Development (33%)

• Drive continuous improvement in infrastructure automation, deployment, and orchestration using tools like Kubernetes, Flux, Terraform

• Collaborate with AI/ML researchers to develop and implement solutions that enable safe and reproducible model-training experiments

• Build a cloud-agnostic platform offering an abstraction layer between science and infrastructure

• Design and develop new workflows and tooling to improve to the reliability, availability and performance of our systems (automation scripts, refactoring, new API-based features, web apps, dashboards, etc.)

• Collaborate with the security team to ensure infrastructure adheres to best security practices and compliance requirements

• Document processes and procedures to ensure consistency and knowledge sharing across the team

• Contribute to open-source projects, research publications, blog articles and conferences

About you

• 10+ years of experience in a DevOps/SRE role.

• Experience with building and leading high-performing teams.

• Experience with cloud computing and highly available distributed systems

• Exposure to site reliability issues in critical environments (issue root cause analysis, in-production troubleshooting, on-call rotations...)

• Experience working against reliability KPIs (observability, alerting, SLAs)

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, containerization and orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes...), monitoring, logging, alerting and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog...), infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation...)

• Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Go, Bash...) and knowledge of software development best practices

• Understanding of networking, security, and system administration concepts

• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills

• Self-motivated and able to work well in a fast-paced startup environment

Your application will be all the more interesting if you also have:

• Experience in an AI/ML environment

• Experience of high-performance computing (HPC) systems and workload managers (Slurm)

• Worked with AI-oriented solutions (Fluidstack, Coreweave, Vast...)

Hiring Process

• Intro Call (30min)

• Tech Culture Interview (30min)

• Technical Rounds

- System Design Interview (45min)

- Deep Dive Interviews (2 x 45min)

• Culture-fit discussion (30min)

Our Culture

We're driven to build a strong company culture and are looking for individuals with solid alignment with the following:

• Reason with rigor

• Are you audacious enough?

• Make our customers succeed

• Ship early and accelerate

• Leave your ego aside

Location

We do not require you to be based in a specific location as long as it is in one of the countries listed in this job posting. However, you will be expected to be available for a monthly visit to one of our offices:

•  🇫🇷 🇩🇪 🇪🇸 If based in France, Germany or Spain: we will ask you to come to our Paris office 3 days per month

•  🇬🇧 If based in the UK: we will ask you to come to our London office 3 days per month

•  We will cover 100% of inter-country travelling and 50% of intra-country travelling fees

Besides, please note that we ask all new hires to come to our Paris HQ for the first month of their onboarding (accommodation and travelling covered).

What we offer

💰 Competitive cash salary and equity

🧑‍⚕️ Health insurance *

🚴 Transportation allowance

🥎 Sport allowance

🥕 Meal vouchers

💰 Private pension plan

🍼 Parental : Generous parental leave policy **

🌎 Visa sponsorship **

* currently not available for Germany

** available for France only