Senior Field Engineer, France

Job description

*The first field engineer we hire in France, joining a Field Engineering team of six worldwide. Elsewhere this job is called Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect or Pre-Sales Engineer. The level follows your background: Senior or Principal.* **Location:** Remote, from anywhere in France **Contract:** Full-time, CDI **Team:** Field Engineering, 6 engineers worldwide, reporting to our Lead Field Engineer **Languages:** French and English, both fluent ### Kestra Kestra is an open-source orchestration platform: one control plane for everything that runs inside a company, from data pipelines and infrastructure automation to business processes and, now, AI agents. We were born in France and the engineering is still here. Our growth now runs through the United States, where an increasing share of our new enterprise business is won, while the French business expands at the same time. In March 2026 we closed a $25M Series A led by RTP Global with Alven, ISAI and Axeleo, alongside founders from Datadog, dbt Labs and Hugging Face. Both sides are accelerating, and this job is part of that. **What we replace.** Control-M. VMware vRA and Aria. Automic. Airflow. Dagster. Prefect. Camunda. AWS Step Functions. Cron at industrial scale. **Where Kestra runs.** Teams at JPMorgan Chase, Apple, TotalEnergies, Crédit Agricole, Leroy Merlin, Bloomberg, and T-Systems run Kestra in production, alongside around a hundred other very large groups. ### Where this is going Every large company today runs four orchestration stacks that do not talk to each other. One for data. One for infrastructure. One for business processes. One for the batch chains inherited from the mainframe era. Each was bought by a different team in a different decade, each has its own scheduler, its own audit trail, its own way of failing at 3am. Nobody in the building can answer the question "what is running right now, and what stops if this stops". Agents are about to make that worse, fast. They are being deployed exactly the way data pipelines were deployed in 2015: one team at a time, each with its own runner, no shared governance, no common view. An autonomous system nobody can see is not something a bank puts into production, and every CIO we speak to already knows it. Our bet is that those four stacks collapse into one control plane, and that whoever gets there first defines the category for the next ten years. Kestra orchestrates up to 8 million workflow executions a day. The number matters less than what sits behind it. A bank's payment chain. The provisioning of thousands of servers. The nightly close that has to finish before the markets open. The pipeline a factory plans its week on. Once a company puts all of that on one control plane, the orchestrator stops being a tool inside one team's stack. It becomes the one place where anyone can answer what is running right now, who authorised it, and what stops if it stops. That is what we are going after. Not a better scheduler. The layer every large company is going to need, and will install only once. ### Why this job exists Our French accounts are among our largest and most demanding: banks, insurers, industrial groups, energy, retail. These are not pilots on a side project. They are orchestration migrations that touch thousands of servers and the processing chains the business depends on. The engineering is rarely the hard part. The hard part is the six months between "this looks promising" and "our production runs on it": mapping a setup nobody fully documented, agreeing in writing what success means, convincing the architect who was perfectly happy with the old tool, becoming the person a CTO calls first. We are opening this job in France because those accounts deserve an engineer in their timezone, in their language, who can be in the room. ### What you will do One job across the whole cycle, from the first technical conversation to the years that follow. - **Run the technical evaluations** alongside the Account Executive: understand what is in place, scope two or three use cases, build the demo on their data, design the target architecture, and explain what Kestra replaces. - **Follow your accounts over time:** onboarding, training the teams, architecture reviews, and being the technical contact when something needs solving. - **Grow the usage.** Most of our growth comes from a new team, inside an existing customer, discovering what it can put on the platform. - **Bring the field back into the product.** Our PMs prioritise on what you report. - **Take part in the open-source community** on Slack and GitHub, and write what helps: blueprints, how-to guides, migration notes. ### What you touch every week Kubernetes, Terraform or OpenTofu, Docker, YAML, Git and GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, and the security basics of an enterprise deployment: RBAC, secrets, network isolation, air-gapped installs. Plus whichever of Python, SQL, dbt, Spark or Kafka the account in front of you runs on. ### What your first year looks like **Month 1.** Kestra Enterprise running on your own cluster, one full migration done end to end in a lab, and you have sat in on discovery calls and at least one escalation. **Month 3.** Two or three accounts of your own, and your first evaluation run solo. **Month 12.** A portfolio of French accounts, some of them among our largest. Account teams route architecture questions to you by default, and at least one chapter of the Field Engineering playbook has your name on it. ### What we are looking for This is a senior job. We do not train the technical half here, and we will not put someone in front of a CAC 40 architecture committee for the first time. **Required** - **Hands-on technical.** You write production code, you debug someone else's, and you are at ease in a Kubernetes cluster when it goes wrong. - **You have been alone in front of a customer.** Workshop, POC, technical committee. This job is as much consultant as engineer. - **You have operated or replaced an orchestrator:** Airflow, Prefect, Dagster, Control-M, Automic, vRA, Step Functions, or cron at industrial scale. - **Depth in at least one of:** data engineering (dbt, Spark, Snowflake, DuckDB), platform and IaC (Terraform, Kubernetes, CI/CD), or AI and MLOps (LLM lifecycle, vector databases, agent orchestration). - **Time in a startup or scale-up funded at Series A, B or C**, where you held a scope on your own. - **Long tenures**, at least two roles of two years or more, with complex projects you owned end to end. - **Flawless French and fluent English.** You can explain the same architecture to a CTO and to a junior analyst. ### Why leave a large vendor for this In pre-sales at a company of several thousand people, you know the ceiling: you prove the product, then you hand the account over, and the architecture you argued for gets built by someone else. Here it is the same person from the first call to the third year. Six field engineers cover the world, so what you decide becomes the method, not a local exception. And the product is open source: you read the code you sell, open an issue, and see it fixed by someone you speak to every week. ### The hard parts We would rather you read this now than find out in month three. - You will sometimes be the only technical person a customer trusts during an incident. - Some evaluations are lost, and some are lost for reasons that have nothing to do with the product. - Enterprise migrations are slow. If you need a visible result every two weeks, this job will wear you down. - The Field Engineering playbook is half written. You will write parts of it while doing the job, not before. ### What we offer - **Compensation benchmarked against what US software vendors pay for this role in France**, plus BSPCE for everyone. You get the number in our first conversation. - Remote-first, flexible hours, no core-hours theatre. - A whole-company offsite every year. - Equipment budget. - Conference and training budget, and the time to use it. ### How we hire 1. **45 minutes with our Lead Field Engineer:** your background, one architecture you have operated end to end, and your questions. 2. **45 minutes with Emmanuel, our CEO.** ### Two conversations, no take-home exercise, and a decision within a week of the first call. How to apply Send your CV and one page on an orchestration setup you have operated or replaced: what it ran, what broke when it grew, and what you would rebuild differently today. We read the page first.