Applied Scientist Lead (Robotics)

Location: Hybrid in Paris, with other locations in Amsterdam, London, and Lausanne; EMEA

Company

Mistral AI provides full-stack AI solutions, including frontier models, developer tools, applications, and compute, for customized enterprise AI systems across high-stakes industries.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for robotics research, including problems, models, data, and benchmarks.
• Lead high-stakes robotics projects with customers and partners from scoping through deployment.
• Build and mentor a team of robotics Applied Scientists and Research Engineers.
• Pre-train, post-train, and deploy state-of-the-art models on clusters with thousands of GPUs.
• Define data strategy, generate and curate image-text, video-text, teleoperation, and simulation datasets, and build evaluators for perception, navigation, and manipulation.
• Develop tools and frameworks, collaborate with science, engineering, and product teams, and manage client research communications and senior stakeholders.

Requirements

• Fluent English with excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience leading a technical AI, science, or engineering team while balancing individual-contributor work, team leadership, and stakeholder management.
• Expertise with PyTorch or JAX.
• Deep experience with Vision Language Models, Vision-Language-Action models, perception, navigation, manipulation, and simulation tools such as Isaac Sim.
• Track record of shipping models on real robots.
• Ability to contribute independently to large codebases and write clean, readable, high-performance, fault-tolerant Python.
• Ability to work independently without established roadmaps and navigate uncertainty confidently.
• Collaborative, low-ego approach and willingness to learn.
• Track record of success through personal projects, professional projects, or academia.

Nice to have

• Ex-founder or builder experience.
• PhD or Master’s degree in Robotics, Machine Learning, or a relevant field; exceptional candidates from other backgrounds are welcome.
• Experience with sim-to-real transfer, world models, large-scale robot data collection, large codebases, or large machine learning models at scale.
• Contributions to a large open-source or industry codebase.
• Publications in top academic journals or conferences.
• Experience improving existing code through typing, tests, and CI pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, low-ego, team-oriented environment with teams distributed across Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East.
• Benefits vary by country and may include healthcare coverage, parental leave, retirement plans, relocation support, wellness programs, and meal and transportation allowances.
• Location-specific benefits are provided according to the candidate’s work location.