My 18-Month Journey to Becoming a Research Engineer at Mistral
Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab
I recently joined Mistral as a research engineer after an 18-month journey of strategic upskilling and tactical job hunting. After realizing my current role offered no growth, I resigned to focus full-time on mastering distributed systems and contributing to open source projects like ruff and uv. This path involved balancing high-effort strategic actions, such as attending the Recurse Center, with immediate tactical preparations like LeetCode practice, ultimately leading to a career-defining role.
In the long run, it’s strategy that makes a successful career, but in each moment, there is often significant value in tactical work.