Field Hardware Engineer, Hpc

Mistral AI Mistral AI · AI Frontier · Paris, France · Engineering & Infra

Field Hardware Engineer responsible for maintaining and scaling a large GPU/CPU cluster for an AI company, focusing on end-to-end systems, complex interventions, and guiding junior engineers.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead complex interventions: plan and execute vendor-level or multi-node operations (e.g., full rack work, intricate recabling, post-restart diagnosis), own risk assessment/rollback, and coordinate with vendors (RMA/escalations).
  2. Advanced diagnostics: correlate symptoms across compute, storage, interconnect, cooling; read system indicators (LED/POST/beep), BMC/IPMI consoles, and logs to identify root causes.
  3. Guide and uplift L1s: coach on safe practices (ESD/LOTO), first-line triage, rack craftsmanship, documentation quality; pair on tricky procedures. (No people management.)
  4. Process & automation: improve SOPs/checklists; propose/build small automation (Python/Bash) for photo/serial capture, inventory sync, dashboards/alerts; shorten MTTR.
  5. Safety & compliance: enforce lockout/tagout, ESD, PPE; ensure audit-ready tickets, evidence and change traces.

Skills

Required

  • Data center/server hardware support
  • HPC/AI/Cloud hardware at scale
  • End-to-end hardware expertise (CPU, memory, PCIe, accelerators, NICs, PSUs, drives, network, power, cooling)
  • BMC/IPMI consoles
  • Linux software logs
  • Root cause analysis
  • ESD/LOTO/PPE
  • Communication
  • Mentoring

Nice to have

  • Vendor tools (iDRAC/iLO/IPMI)
  • RAID/storage basics (NVMe/SAS/SATA)
  • High-speed interconnect (Ethernet/InfiniBand)
  • Python/Bash scripting
  • Ticketing systems (Jira/ServiceNow)
  • Inventory/RMA flows
  • Vendor coordination

What the JD emphasized

  • 5+ years in data center/server hardware or L2/L3 hardware support, with proven complex hands-on work in production (HPC/AI/Cloud at scale).
  • End-to-end hardware expertise
  • Diagnostics depth
  • Safety & discipline
  • Communication & mentoring