Critical Infrastructure Engineering Lead
Mistral AI · Paris, Île-de-France
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.
Our mission
Serve as Mistral AI’s senior technical authority for critical electrical, mechanical and life-safety infrastructure across assigned colocation sites. Protect the availability of high-density AI compute by identifying technical risks before they become incidents, challenging infrastructure operating practices and verifying that power and cooling systems perform within agreed requirements.
Operating context & accountability
Working with Engineering Operations leadership, IT Operations, hardware partners and colocation providers, you will provide hands-on technical assurance across a site or cluster. You will assess provider performance, advise on critical decisions, support incident response and ensure operational learning drives durable improvements. The role focuses on technical oversight and influence rather than direct management of the colocation provider’s maintenance workforce.
Technical assurance and operational risk
- Own and maintain the site technical risk register, including electrical and mechanical single points of failure, maintenance exposure, redundancy limitations, cooling capacity, liquid-cooling interfaces and common-mode failure scenarios.
- Assess the resilience of utility connections, MV/LV distribution, transformers, generators, UPS, switchgear, busways, protection systems, pumps, cooling plant, controls and monitoring against the contracted operating envelope.
- Review provider preventive maintenance strategies, schedules, critical asset condition and outstanding defects; identify maintenance deferrals and vulnerabilities that may affect AI compute availability.
- Critically review high-risk methods of procedure, electrical switching and isolation plans, planned impairments, work sequencing, contingency measures, rollback plans and restoration criteria.
- Validate the completeness and quality of technical documentation, including single-line diagrams, P&IDs, operating sequences, alarm matrices, capacity records, asset registers and operating procedures.
- Use BMS/EPMS trends, alarms, power-quality records and cooling telemetry to identify abnormal operating conditions, capacity constraints and deteriorating resilience before service is affected.
Incident response, investigations and reliability
- Act as a senior engineering escalation point during major infrastructure incidents; rapidly assess failure domain, remaining redundancy, safety implications, likely IT impact and viable restoration options.
- Coordinate technical information across the colocation provider, Mistral IT Operations and OEM partners, ensuring accurate incident timelines, risk communication and controlled return to service.
- Review and challenge root-cause analyses, distinguishing immediate triggers from underlying design, maintenance, controls, process and organizational contributors.
- Define and follow up corrective and preventive actions, requesting evidence of implementation and verifying that recurring failure modes have been addressed.
- Identify systemic trends across sites and share lessons learned with engineering design, commissioning and regional operations teams.
- Support emergency response planning and tabletop exercises covering loss of utility, cooling failures, liquid leaks, fire/life-safety events and critical equipment failures.
Capacity delivery, commissioning and change control
- Participate in design and constructability reviews for expansions, retrofits and new AI deployments; flag operational, maintainability and resilience concerns early.
- Review commissioning and integrated systems testing plans, including power transfers, redundancy scenarios, controls failure modes, cooling recovery and operational readiness criteria.
- Challenge test results and acceptance evidence against defined electrical, thermal and operational requirements; track unresolved technical issues through handover.
- Partner with IT Operations on rack power and thermal limits, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, coolant distribution unit boundaries, leak response and load-restoration dependencies.
- Assess proposed changes to critical infrastructure, including concurrent maintenance, controls updates and brownfield works; recommend safeguards and escalation where exposure is unacceptable.
- Provide technical coaching to internal stakeholders, contribute to engineering standards and support recruitment and knowledge sharing as the portfolio expands.
Success measures
- Critical technical risks are identified early, prioritized and reduced through verified mitigation actions, supporting Mistral’s availability objectives.
- High-risk maintenance and infrastructure changes receive timely, evidence-based technical review with clear mitigations and escalation.
- Major incidents are diagnosed accurately, communicated effectively and followed by robust root-cause analysis and verified corrective actions.
- New and expanded capacity meets agreed redundancy, electrical, cooling and operational acceptance requirements.
- Repeat failures, unresolved high-severity defects and preventable technical deviations decrease over time.
Minimum qualifications
- 5–7+ years in critical facilities engineering, commissioning, data center operations or technical assurance in high-availability environments.
- Strong practical knowledge of critical electrical infrastructure (UPS, generators, MV/LV distribution, switchgear and protection) and mechanical systems (cooling plant, pumps, controls and heat rejection).
- Ability to review single-line diagrams, operating sequences, technical procedures, maintenance plans, commissioning evidence and root-cause analyses.
- Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex infrastructure incidents and influencing external technical teams without direct line authority.
- Clear written and verbal English communication, sound judgment under pressure and willingness to travel and participate in incident escalation as needed.
Preferred experience
- Full technical governance, multi-site operations or mission-critical facilities serving high-density AI/HPC workloads.
- Experience with direct-to-chip liquid cooling, CDUs, facility/technology cooling interfaces, water quality, leak detection and rack-level thermal management.
- Integrated systems testing, EPMS/BMS trend analysis, protection coordination, failure-mode reviews and cross-site engineering standardization.
- Experience partnering with hardware OEMs, design engineers, commissioning teams and infrastructure providers during live-site expansion.
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 https://app.notion.com/p/mistralai/Benefits-at-Mistral-36e6ba59a7fe836b93dd01737fcc27ef?source=copy_link.
PRIVACY POLICY
Your privacy matters to us. You can learn more about how we handle your personal data in our Applicant Privacy Policy https://legal.mistral.ai/terms/applicant-privacy-policy.