interviewing at Mistral in about 3 weeks for a backend/infra role and I'm trying to get a picture of what the current loop looks like. I know they move fast and the process has probably evolved a lot in the past year.
drop what you know: number of rounds, what was tested, how long the process took total, role type. not looking for prep advice, just raw data on the process structure.
my understanding so far is: recruiter call, technical screen, maybe a coding round, then a team fit / final. but I've seen people mention 3 rounds and others say 5. would love to calibrate.
3 replies
infra_ines
applied for a platform role, got 3 rounds total: recruiter, technical with a senior eng (systems design + some distributed systems q's), and a final. no take-home. timeline was about 2.5 weeks. this was about 2 months ago so take it with a grain of salt.
backend_bekah
friend went through for backend eng, said 4 rounds for her: recruiter, live coding (Python, fairly standard), a system design round with a staff eng, and a final panel that was mostly conversational. about 3 weeks start to finish. no LeetCode hard she said, more like medium-difficulty practical problems.
ml_mike
my loop was 4 rounds but for research eng, the technical bar is different from infra/backend. they care a lot less about leetcode and a lot more about whether you can think about ML systems. might not extrapolate directly to your role.