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.
- angarg12
My last job search 2 years ago took me 9 months of grinding while working full time at Big Tech and +15 years of experience. After loops with ~30 companies I ended up with about 6 offers.
The offers were all over the shop. Some places downleveled me to mid level while others upleveled me. The comp range was about 3x between the lowest and the highest.
Also I couldn't find much of a pattern on the processes and outcomes. No name companies rejected my application without even a phone screen. Lower tier companies offered me lower levels while famously hard to crack ones offered me higher levels. I also didn't see much correlation on how hard interviews were.
I'm totally convinced the job market is a numbers game and there is a high degree of randomness and luck involved. Discipline and hard work help, but outcomes are far from guaranteed. Last time I almost didn't leave my job since most offers were worse than my then current one, until I got 2 high quality offers at the end.
I have only skimmed through the article but I'm impressed OP got a job as a Research Engineer with no formal background, given that I got doors slammed even after PhD + years of relevant experience. I don't want to diminish the accomplishment, but I would be very wary of anecdata and formulas for success. OP quit his job and focused 100% on the search, and it paid off. I know many more similar stories that didn't pan out, and people had to rush to get lower quality jobs or, in the worst cases, got into long […]
- throw0101a
I'm not sure why the OP is using that word: he is working for a (for-profit) company, not at a "lab".
> Mistral AI SAS (French: [mistʁal]) is a French artificial intelligence (AI) company headquartered in Paris.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistral_AI
I'm not sure why "lab" is being used for all of these companies in this space. Is it an attempt to sweep their money motivations under the rug, or something else?
- conceptme
18 month job hunt is pretty rough, I get that he really wanted this but for most people with "normal" lives outside work this would be a very risky move.