Technical Research Lead - AI Safety

About Mistral

At Mistral AI, we believe in the power of AI to simplify tasks, save time, and enhance learning and creativity. Our technology is designed to integrate seamlessly into daily working life.

We democratize AI through high-performance, optimized, open-source and cutting-edge models, products and solutions. Our comprehensive AI platform is designed to meet enterprise as well as personal needs. Our offerings include Le Chat, AI Studio, Mistral Code and Mistral Compute — a suite that brings frontier intelligence to end-users.

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 France, USA, UK, Germany and Singapore. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

Join us to be part of a pioneering company shaping the future of AI. Together, we can make a meaningful impact. See more about our culture on https://mistral.ai/careers.

Role Summary

We’re looking for a technical research lead to lead our safety team. The safety team is responsible for model- and system-level safeguards at Mistral. The topics of focus of the team include:

• Developing post-training methods to ensure our models remain safe and capable in unfamiliar or adversarial scenarios.
• Developing classifiers or system-level safeguards to detect, monitor, or prevent misuse across priority surface areas in enterprise use cases.
• Evaluating and improving the safety of agentic models and products - developing both threat models and environments to test for agentic risks, and developing and deploying mitigations for prompt injection attacks.
• Building eval tooling to monitor the susceptibility of models to generate harmful content, and conducting research on automated red-teaming, adversarial robustness, and other research that helps test for or find misuse.
• Investigating and responding to safety incident reports.
  
  
  

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What You Will Do

• Manage day-to-day execution of the team's work.
• Maintain a sufficiently deep understanding of the technical stack to make targeted contributions as an individual contributor.
• Prioritize the team’s work and manage projects in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.
• Coach and support your reports in understanding and pursuing their professional growth.
• Maintain a deep understanding of the team's technical work and contribute technically yourself.
  
  
  

Who you are:

• 8+ years in AI/ML research or engineering
• Proven leadership in building and scaling AI teams or initiatives.

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• Deep technical mastery of machine learning, deep learning, and AI systems, with hands-on experience in frontier model development.
• You have a proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers, ideally in a safety-relevant domain.
• You are a highly proficient software engineer in Python.
• You have hands-on experience with AI frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, JAX) or distributed systems (e.g. Ray, Kubernetes).
• You are a self-starter, autonomous and a team player.
  
  
  

Now, it would be ideal if you :

• You have hands-on experience with training large transformer models in a distributed fashion.
• Experience in AI safety.
• Interdisciplinary expertise (ethics, policy, governance, or philosophy of technology) and ability to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• You have a strong publication record in a relevant scientific domain (e.g. AI safety, alignment, interpretability).
  
  

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Note that this is not an exhaustive or necessary list of requirements. Please consider applying if you believe you have the skills to contribute to Mistral's mission. We value profile and experience diversity.

What we offer:

FRANCE VERSION 🇫🇷

💰 Competitive cash salary and equity

🥕 Daily lunch vouchers : Swile meal vouchers with 10,83€ per worked day, incl 60% offered by company

🥎 Sport : Enjoy discounted access to gyms and fitness studios through our Wellpass partnership

🚴 Transportation : Monthly contribution to a mobility pass via Betterway

🧑‍⚕️ Health : Full health insurance for you and your family

🍼 Parental : Generous parental leave policy

🌎 Visa sponsorship

🤝 Coaching: we offer BetterUp coaching on a voluntary basis