Mistral.ai

Research Engineer, Inference Foundation

Paris, France full-time Mid Salary not listed
full-time Mid level Technology & IT Curated
Sign in to apply Free account — we bring you straight back to this role.

About the role

About Mistral
Mistral provides full-stack AI solutions: from frontier models to developer tools, applications, and compute. We partner with enterprises tackling the hardest problems across high-stakes industries like finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector, co-creating customized AI systems that they can run on their terms.
We are a dynamic, collaborative team passionate about AI and its potential to transform society. Our diverse workforce thrives in competitive environments and is committed to driving innovation. Our teams are distributed between Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

The Role
The Inference Foundation team owns the core of Mistral's inference stack: the inference engine and its orchestration, from the feature set and configuration that serve our models in production to the release machinery that keeps the stack current and production-grade.
This is a hybrid position spanning production LLM serving, engine and platform development, and capacity engineering. You will work on three intertwined problems:
Optimize the inference stack at scale — feature development and fixes in the engine and orchestrator, squeezing more throughput and lower latency out of every GPU under strict quality-of-service targets.

Make capacity elastic — scaling up and down should be cheap and fast, not a performance cliff.

Power the training of our frontier models — high-performance serving that keeps RL and post-training loops running at full speed.

 
What You Will Do
Inference engine & orchestration
Develop and fix the core of the inference stack — engine and orchestrator — including feature selection, configuration, and tuning for maximum performance at scale

Own the release process for the serving stack: validated, regression-free releases through automated performance gates and progressive rollout

Drive improvements and fixes upstream when the open-source engine is the right place for them

Performance & capacity at scale
Optimize serving efficiency across the fleet — driving down pod startup time, tackling cold-cache regressions on scale-up, smarter caching and offloading

Optimize and maintain the optimal serving topology — overlap communication and transfers with computation, ensure optimal placement, connectivity, and routing

Serving for frontier training
Build the serving infrastructure that powers RL and post-training for our frontier models

Optimize inference performance across the full spectrum of our workloads

 
What We're Looking For
Experience building and running ML/LLM services at scale, with clear latency and availability targets

Hands-on experience with inference engines such as vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, or others

A solid grasp of inference internals: prefill vs. decode, KV-cache behavior, batching, scheduling, speculative decoding, parallelism strategies

Familiarity with distributed and disaggregated serving architectures

Comfortable debugging across the full stack — CUDA/NCCL, kernels, containers, networking, storage

Python for systems tooling and backend services; PyTorch

Kubernetes for running infrastructure at scale

GPU and networking fundamentals: CUDA runtime, NCCL, InfiniBand/RDMA

It Would Be Great If You Have
Demonstrated vLLM/sglang know-how — upstream contributions, or a track record of running in demanding production environments

Hardware-aware optimization for various model architectures

Experience serving MoE models at scale (expert parallelism, expert placement/load balancing)

CUDA/Triton kernel development; Nsight Systems/Compute profiling

Rust and/or C++ in production systems

What We Offer
We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Benefits vary by country and may include healthcare coverage, parental leave, retirement plans, relocation support, wellness programs, meal and transportation allowances, and other location-specific perks.
For the most up-to-date details on benefits available in your location, please refer to our Benefits page.

Privacy Policy
Your privacy matters to us. You can learn more about how we handle your personal data in our Applicant Privacy Policy.
Find more English Speaking Jobs in Germany on Arbeitnow

Interview prep

Walk in with sharper answers.

Use this as a quick practice sheet before you speak with the employer.

Mid
Technology & IT Finance Python Research Engineer Inference Mid level

Likely questions

  1. Tell us about work you have done that is close to the Research Engineer, Inference Foundation role.
  2. How would you approach your first 30 days at Mistral.ai?
  3. Which of Finance, Python and Research have you used recently, and what did it help you achieve?
  4. Describe a time you solved a problem without waiting to be told exactly what to do.
  5. How do you handle busy days, changing priorities, or pressure at work?

Prepare before the call

  • A recent example that proves your experience with Finance, Python and Research.
  • One short story with a problem, your action, and the result.
  • Two examples that show the strengths listed on your CV.
  • A clear reason why this role and company interest you.
  • Your availability, preferred work style, and salary expectations.

Ask them

  • What would success look like in the first 90 days?
  • What are the main problems this hire should help solve?
  • How does the team give feedback and measure good work?
  • What does a normal working week look like for this role?
Practice line

I am interested in the Research Engineer, Inference Foundation role because I can bring practical experience in Finance, Python and Research, learn the team quickly, and contribute to the outcomes Mistral.ai needs from this hire.

Related jobs.

More roles from this company or category.