Research Engineer

Who you are

• 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
• 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 the job involves

• 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 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
• 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
• 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
• Build the serving infrastructure that powers RL and post-training for our frontier models
• Optimize inference performance across the full spectrum of our workloads

Benefits

• Competitive bonus structure
• Equity
• Opportunities for professional growth and development