Applied for a research engineer role (Paris-remote hybrid). Here's the breakdown:
Round 1: Recruiter call, 25 min. Mostly logistics: what I'm looking for, visa status, timeline. She was direct and didn't waste time.
Round 2: Technical screen with a senior researcher. An hour. No LeetCode. We spent maybe 20 min on ML fundamentals: attention mechanisms, how MoE routing actually works, tradeoffs between dense and sparse models. Then 30 min on a practical problem about inference latency and how you'd approach reducing it in a production setting. I could tell they were evaluating whether I had opinions, not just knowledge.
Round 3: Coding + systems. Given a small Python task involving tokenization and called to walk through some inference optimization code I'd written in the past. They wanted to see how I reason about performance, not just whether I can code.
Round 4: Final with eng lead and one co-founder-adjacent person. Mostly a conversation. They asked what I found interesting about Mistral's technical direction vs. other labs. You have to have an actual answer to that, not a platitude.
Total loop: about 3 weeks. Got an offer. The process felt like talking to a research team that wants to hire collaborators, not just headcount. Definitely not a generic FAANG loop.