Stateful Services Team Lead

Build the infrastructure behind the next generation of AI-powered customer communications

Diabolocom is building an AI-first communication platform where AI and human agents, business workflows and communication channels work together seamlessly.

As we enter our next phase of growth, we are looking for a Stateful services Lead to scale the infrastructure foundation behind the platform.

This is a unique opportunity to take part in leading an infrastructure organization combining carrier-grade voice systems, on-premise data centers, distributed systems and AI workloads, while building the operational maturity required to support 3x growth.

You will report directly to Sergei, our CTO, and lead the growth of stateful services scope - owning operational excellence, team development and execution of infrastructure initiatives, while actively contributing to technical strategy and architecture decisions.

Your mission

Your goal is to build and lead the team responsible for the reliability, scalability and evolution of Diabolocom’s stateful services - with a strong focus on databases and data stores.

You will ensure that our databases and stateful systems remain highly available, reliable and performant, while evolving our infrastructure so that maintenance, upgrades and scaling can be performed safely and with minimal to no downtime.

Starting with a small squad, you will combine hands-on technical expertise, system design and team leadership to build the foundations of a scalable Stateful Services infrastructure and the team.

You will:

• Own the reliability and day-to-day operations of our stateful services, including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, RabbitMQ and Kafka/Redpanda.
• Lead the design, evolution and scaling of our database infrastructure, with 50+ PostgreSQL instances and increasingly complex data workloads.
• Rework and expand our database clusters to enable maintenance, upgrades and migrations without service disruption.
• Improve high availability, replication, failover, backup/restore and disaster recovery practices across our stateful systems.
• Work closely with development teams to understand their needs, support their use of databases and help them design reliable data architectures.
• Collaborate with SRE, networking and infrastructure teams to ensure our stateful services operate reliably within our broad infrastructure.
• Investigate and solve complex performance, scalability and reliability issues across databases and distributed systems.
• Establish the processes, standards and operational practices needed to run stateful services reliably at scale.
• Stay hands-on and close to the technology: this is a leadership role where technical depth and ownership matter more than hierarchy.

Who we are looking for

We’re looking for a technically strong and hands-on Stateful Services Lead who enjoys solving complex infrastructure problems and taking ownership of systems where reliability really matters.

You have deep experience operating databases and stateful services in production, ideally in challenging, high-availability environments. You are comfortable going beyond simply maintaining systems: you understand how they work, how they fail, how to scale them, and how to design them to remain reliable as the company grows.

You’ll be the technical leader of a new squad, combining hands-on expertise with the ability to build strong engineering practices and grow a team over time.

Must Have

• Strong hands-on experience as a DBA, Database Engineer or similar, with solid expertise in PostgreSQL.
• Production experience with ClickHouse or another complex database/data platform.
• Experience operating and maintaining databases at scale, including upgrades, migrations, replication, backups, recovery and performance tuning.
• Strong understanding of high availability and reliability for stateful systems: failover, redundancy, replication, disaster recovery and minimizing or eliminating downtime during maintenance.
• Good understanding of distributed systems, including consistency, fault tolerance, replication and the challenges of operating stateful services at scale.
• Experience working with on-premise infrastructure and bare-metal environments. You are comfortable operating outside of a public-cloud-only environment.
• Strong system design skills and the ability to make pragmatic technical decisions around scalability, reliability and performance.
• Experience collaborating closely with software development teams, understanding their requirements and helping them build reliable solutions around databases and stateful services.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers, or the demonstrated ability to grow into a technical leadership role. We care more about your technical depth and ownership than the number of years you've spent in a Lead title.
• Strong hands-on mindset: you enjoy getting into the technical details and solving complex problems yourself rather than operating only at a managerial level.
• Fluent English, both written and spoken. French or other languages are a plus.

Nice to Have

Experience with some of the following:

• Kafka or Redpanda and event-streaming infrastructure.
• RabbitMQ and message-broker infrastructure.
• Redis and distributed caching.
• Other database technologies such as Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB.
• Advanced Linux systems administration, including processes, storage, networking and troubleshooting.
• Observability and monitoring of stateful systems.
• Capacity planning, performance analysis and load testing.
• Infrastructure automation and configuration management.
• Incident management, root-cause analysis and post-mortem practices.
• Experience building a new engineering team or squad from the ground up

About You

• You take ownership. When you see a reliability or scalability problem, you don’t wait for someone else to solve it.
• You are genuinely technical. You like understanding how things work under the hood and are comfortable diving deep when something breaks.
• You think in systems. You understand that databases don't operate in isolation and enjoy working across infrastructure, networking, SRE and development teams.
• You care about reliability. For you, a successful system is one that can be maintained, upgraded and scaled without putting the business at risk.
• You are pragmatic. You can balance technical excellence with business needs and make sensible trade-offs in complex environments.
• You are curious and self-driven. You learn by doing, investigate unfamiliar technologies and are comfortable figuring things out independently.
• You enjoy building. This is a new squad, and you’ll have the opportunity to shape its technical practices, ways of working and the team as it grows.
• You lead through expertise and context. You don't need a title to take the lead, and you know how to bring others along when solving difficult technical problems.
• You communicate clearly. You can explain complex technical topics to engineers and non-specialists alike and build strong relationships with the teams relying on your services.

Why join us

• Own critical infrastructure: your work will directly impact the reliability and scalability of Diabolocom’s platform.
• Solve complex technical challenges: work with large-scale databases and stateful services, including PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka and Redis.
• Build from the ground up: shape a new squad, its technical practices and its culture as the team grows.
• Stay hands-on: tackle challenging infrastructure problems while having a real technical impact.
• Work across teams: collaborate closely with Engineering, SRE and Infrastructure to build reliable systems at scale.

Recruitment Process

• Introductory call with Jade - 30 min

  Get to know each other and discuss your background.

• Interview with Sergey, CTO - 1 hour

  Discuss your technical background, skills and knowledge.

• On-site System Design interview with Sergey, CTO - 1 hour

  Work through a technical case study and explore your system design approach.

• Team & cultural fit - 1 hour

  Onsite or via video.

Logistics

Paris, rue de la Paix, 75002

Hybrid model: 2 remote days/week

Equipment: choose your preferred setup (Mac/Linux + monitors)

Lunch vouchers

Navigo: 50% of the monthly pass reimbursed

One More Thing

We are not necessarily looking for someone who has already done this exact role in this exact environment.

The strongest candidates are often engineers who grew into leadership by taking ownership, solving complex problems and going beyond their formal responsibilities.

If you have built and operated complex infrastructure, enjoy solving ambiguous technical challenges and want to shape a critical engineering domain - we would love to talk.