Staff Backend Engineer / Tech Lead Manager

Nebius Managed Kubernetes (mk8s) mission is to grow the Nebius cloud platform by providing a Kubernetes-native way to run AI systems with high efficiency and low operational overhead.
With a single click, it provides a Kubernetes cluster on top of Nebius services for compute (VMs) and networking.
In 2026, the service is scaling 10× and is expected to manage customer workloads across tens of thousands of GPU servers in more than 10 data centers.

You will lead the mk8s Core team, one of three mk8s teams. The Core team owns the API, the core of the service control plane, cluster autoscaling, platform integrations, and running k8s add-ons.
At Nebius, team leads are hands-on. We expect you to be a senior or staff engineer now (or earlier in your career). You will start as an individual contributor to gain context, then take on managerial responsibilities.

In this position, you will be responsible to:

• Lead by example. Set the quality bar by spending a significant portion of your time on IC work: writing and reviewing code, leading projects, and participating in on-call rotation, incident mitigation, and post-incident analysis.
• Manage 4–8 mid-to-senior engineers. Provide context, coach, and give regular feedback.
• Maintain the technical vision for your area of responsibility.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager and Service Owner to shape product vision and plans.

Examples of outcomes you could drive as a Team Lead

• Optimize the service control plane to create and manage 20K GPU nodes in a single Kubernetes cluster, enabling a major contract for the company.
• Integrate cluster autoscaling approaches (e.g., Karpenter) to improve resource utilization and support seamless auto-upgrades.
• Provide a Kubernetes-native way to use local disks to reduce disk I/O bottlenecks for AI training and inference, improving efficiency.
• Deliver managed Layer 7 load balancers to reduce operational overhead for customers.

What you will bring to the table:<