Artemis Squad - Tech Lead

About Pelico

At Pelico, state-of-the-art technology meets supply-chain expertise in the search for operational excellence. Our manufacturing intelligence platform helps factories at Safran, Airbus, Daikin and other aerospace, defense, and industrial leaders stay agile and resilient — turning disruption into decisions. We're a fast-growing international SaaS scale-up: 180+ Pelicans, 36+ nationalities, across Paris and Miami , making real impact, every day, on the ground .

About The Squad

Pelico is a configuration-driven, AI-native platform — a field engineer stands up a running factory application by authoring YAML instead of writing code. Artemis is the squad that makes all of it deployable, scalable, and operable. We own horizontal scalability (scale-out compute workers, backend autoscaling, database scaling toward 1 billion events and 1,000 concurrent users) and packaging & distribution — building, shipping, and operating Pelico across cloud, on-prem, air-gapped, agentic sandboxes, demo, and the field-engineer workstation.

We're an infra-heavy squad (a Tech Lead, ~3 backend engineers, and 2 Platform Engineers), and everything every other squad ships rides on what we run.

One thing makes this role unusual. At Pelico, coordinating complex distributed services isn't thrown over the wall to a separate ops team — distributed coordination is a first-class service-level requirement, owned in code. Software engineers and Platform Engineers co-own it (the worker fleet, the broker/leader protocol, the Coordinator lifecycle, backpressure, consistency under scale). That's why this is a software-engineering role as much as an SRE/IaaS one, and why we ask for real Java/Kotlin depth: you'll ship and review the coordination code, not just operate it — the “you build it, you run it” model, applied to coordination.

Your mission

You'll own — and personally build — the infrastructure that turns Pelico into a system customers depend on:

1. Scale it. Engineer worker fan-out, backend autoscaling, and database scaling toward the 1-billion-event, 1,000-user bar.

2. Ship it everywhere. One build, five targets — cloud, on-prem/air-gapped, agentic sandbox, demo, and the field-engineer workstation — via embeddable images, the pelico infra CLI, and multi-config templates, with a real release-and-rollback path.

3. Operate it. Stand up observability and an incident-response harness — golden signals, SLOs, on-call, MTTR — so Pelico stays up on customer infrastructure.

4. Run the edge and the AI substrate. Own the API-gateway / identity / edge-proxy runtime and config, and co-own Pelico's AI infrastructure (MCP servers, model registries, prompt/skill libraries, agent harnesses) with our AI-platform squad.

5. Lead by example. Write the distribution code, the IaC, and the runbooks; pair with your engineers; set the operational bar; and grow the squad as the reliability and leverage you ship earn it.

Your impact

Every squad's code and every customer deployment runs on what Artemis builds. Get it right and you give the whole company — and every Regional pod and field engineer — a platform they can scale and deploy with confidence. Get it wrong and nothing reaches the factory floor. This is the highest-leverage infrastructure seat at Pelico.

What we're looking for

This is a lead-by-example role for a senior engineer who is DevOps / SRE / IaaS at heart and a real software engineer — because at Pelico distributed coordination is service-level code you co-own, not hand off. You lead by being in the code, the IaC, and the on-call rotation with your team. You're excited by high-blast-radius problems, you measure yourself by reliability and the leverage you give others, and you've shipped systems that scale and stay up.

You'll need:

• A track record of owning production infrastructure others build and run on — scalability, packaging/distribution, deployment, and operations

• IaC and orchestration — Terraform or Pulumi, Kubernetes, Docker/OCI, and a major cloud (AWS / GCP / Azure / OVH)

• SRE / operability — observability (metrics, logs, traces), incident response, SLOs/error budgets, autoscaling

• Distributed coordination & backend scaling — you treat coordination as service-level code (fleet/leader protocols, orchestration, lifecycle, backpressure, consistency) and can scale it (Postgres tuning, connection pooling, worker scale-out at large scale)

• Hands-on coding — this is a coding seat (coordination is service-level code); we build in Java 25 / Kotlin (Maven reactor); strong here, or a fast learner

• A track record of leading infra engineers by example , not by leaving the keyboard

Nice to have:

• API-gateway / IdP / edge runtime + config-as-product (Kong, Keycloak, Traefik or equivalents)

• AI infrastructure — hosting MCP servers, model registries, prompt/skill libraries, or agent harnesses

• GitLab CI at scale; release engineering / progressive delivery

• On-prem, air-gapped, or defense-grade deployment

• AI-native ways of working (agentic workflows, eval on agent output, spec-driven development)

• French is a plus, not a requirement

If you bring the essentials and a strong mix of the rest, we want to hear from you — we're hiring the person who'll make this real, not a checklist. (Internal candidates ready to step up from a senior infra role: this seat is for you too.)

What we offer

• A real ownership mandate over Pelico's scalability and distribution, with equity in a category-defining scale-up

• The highest-leverage infrastructure problems in the company, with real customers and real scale

• An AI-native engineering culture and a small, elite squad — be challenged, learn, and have fun

Your interview experience

1. Intro call with Talent Acquisition (30 min)

2. Hiring manager conversation with the VP Engineering (45 min)

3. Case Study Onsite:
   - Scalability & distribution design deep-dive — design how Pelico scales and ships across cloud, on-prem, and the field-engineer workstation (1h)
   - Live pairing session with the squad (1h30) — work on real infra / IaC / deploy together; this is where we see how you lead by example

4. SRE & platform-as-product conversation (observability, incident response, adoption, deprecation) (1h)

5. Leadership conversation + founders (CEO/CTO)

6. References , run in parallel

Pelico is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building a team that reflects the manufacturers we serve. All applications are reviewed — we'll get back to you.