Research Engineer, Inference Foundation
About this 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.
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