Hardware Deployment Engineering Team Lead

The role

Nebius is building and deploying large-scale AI infrastructure across multiple data centers. Our Hardware Deployment Engineering team is responsible for the technical bring-up, validation, troubleshooting and handover of new GPU, compute and storage infrastructure.

We are looking for a Hardware Deployment Engineering Team Lead to manage and develop the Deployment Engineering team across EMEA. This is a hands-on technical leadership role that combines people management, capacity planning, project coordination and infrastructure engineering.

You will lead engineers working across new data center launches and expansion projects. You will also serve as the primary point of contact between Deployment Engineering, project management, Data Center Operations and other engineering teams & will report to the Head of Hardware Delivery and Deployment.

This position is based at our headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Remote work is not available for this role. Regular travel to data centers across EMEA will be required

Your responsibilities will include:

Lead the Deployment Engineering team

• Manage a team of Deployment Engineers across EMEA.
• Hold regular 1:1s, provide feedback, set expectations, and support engineers in their development.
• Assign responsibilities and make sure engineers have clear ownership during deployments.
• Identify skill gaps and build technical depth within the team.
• Support hiring, onboarding, and performance management as the team grows.
• Remove blockers for engineers and escalate organizational or technical issues when necessary.

Own deployment engineering planning

• Represent Deployment Engineering in project planning and synchronization meetings for new data center launches.
• Understand upcoming deployment milestones and translate them into engineering resource requirements.
• Plan engineer allocation across multiple parallel projects and deployment phases.
• Make sure the right technical expertise is available for hardware bring-up, testing, troubleshooting, and acceptance.
• Identify resource conflicts and delivery risks early rather than reacting to them during deployment.
• Maintain a clear view of team capacity, project priorities, travel requirements, and upcoming workload.

Drive technical execution

• Ensure deployment testing and hardware bring-up are executed consistently and to the required quality level.
• Support engineers with complex hardware, firmware, Linux, and systems troubleshooting.
• Step into critical technical issues when deeper investigation or coordination is required.
• Drive problems toward a clearly identified failure domain, root cause, or actionable escalation.
• Coordinate with R&D, DC Operations, vendors, ODMs, and other engineering teams when issues cross organizational boundaries.
• Make sure deployment findings result in fixes, documentation, tooling, or process improvements rather than remaining one-off solutions.

Improve how we deploy infrastructure

• Build repeatable deployment processes, standards, checklists, and troubleshooting practices.
• Improve the quality and predictability of hardware testing and acceptance.
• Identify recurring deployment problems and drive systemic fixes upstream into factory, hardware, firmware, tooling, or operational processes.
• Improve handover from Deployment Engineering to steady-state operations.
• Help develop automation and tooling that reduce manual work and increase deployment scale.

We expect you to have:

• Strong experience with server hardware, data center infrastructure, or large-scale systems deployment.
• Experience leading engineers, either as a formal people manager or as a strong technical/team lead with clear ownership for other engineers.
• Ability to plan resources and coordinate engineering work across several projects running in parallel.
• Strong ownership mindset and the ability to operate in environments where procedures are incomplete and problems are not yet well understood.
• Ability to challenge assumptions, investigate beyond the immediate symptom, and drive issues to resolution.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with project managers, engineering teams, operations, and external vendors.
• Comfortable working directly in data centers and traveling across EMEA when required.

It will be an added bonus if you have:

• Linux troubleshooting skills and a solid understanding of modern server architecture.
• Experience diagnosing hardware and infrastructure problems across components such as CPU, memory, NVMe, PCIe, NICs, BMC, BIOS, and firmware.
• Experience deploying GPU or AI infrastructure at scale.
• Experience with large server fleets or hyper-scale environments.
• Experience working with ODMs or server vendors during production, deployment, or failure investigation.
• Experience with automated hardware validation or fleet-level testing.
• Experience building a deployment, infrastructure, SRE, hardware reliability, or similar engineering team.

What success looks like

You will not be measured by how many individual servers you personally troubleshoot or deploy.

Success means that Deployment Engineering operates as a reliable function: projects know when and how to engage the team, engineers are assigned to the right work, technical problems are driven to resolution, deployment risks are visible early, engineers are developing, and new infrastructure can move from delivery to operational readiness predictably.

You will be the person the Head of Hardware Delivery and Deployment can rely on to run the EMEA Deployment Engineering function day to day, while also continuously improving how the team operates and scales.