Applied Scientist Lead (Robotics), EMEA

The Role

Mistral AI is seeking a Lead / Staff Applied Scientist to help lead our robotics research and industrial collaborations in the Applied Science team. You will set the technical direction for robotics, and design, train, and deploy SOTA robotics models (VLM, VLA models for navigation and manipulation) with our industrial partners.

Working cross-functionally with both external and internal science, engineering, and product teams you will deliver high-impact AI solutions. We are made of researchers, engineers, product builders, ex-founders who love tackling the most complex real world problems in the industry.

What you will do

• Set the technical direction for robotics in Applied Science: which problems, models, data, and benchmarks we invest in.
• Lead the technical execution of high-stakes robotics projects with customers and partners, from scoping to deployment.
• Build and mentor a team of robotics Applied Scientists and Research Engineers.
• Run pre-training, post-training and deploy state of the art models on clusters with thousands of GPUs.
• Own the data strategy: generate and curate datasets (image-text, video-text, teleoperation, simulation), and build evaluators/benchmarks for perception, navigation and manipulation tasks.
• Develop the necessary tools and frameworks to facilitate data generation, model training, evaluation and deployment.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to tackle complex use cases.
• Manage research projects and communications with client research teams, and engage senior stakeholders.

About you

• Fluent in English with excellent communication skills — at ease explaining complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience leading a technical AI, science or engineering team. Balancing technical IC work with team leadership and stakeholder management.
• Expert with PyTorch or JAX.
• Deep experience with Vision Language Models (VLM), Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, perception, navigation and manipulation, simulation tools (e.g. Isaac SIM), with a track record of shipping models on real robots.
• Not afraid of contributing to a big codebase; finds their way around independently with little guidance.
• Writes clean, readable, high-performance, fault-tolerant Python code.
• Doesn’t need roadmaps: moves independently and navigates uncertainty with confidence.
• Low-ego, collaborative and eager to learn.
• Track record of success through personal projects, professional projects or academia.

Nice to have

• Ex-founder or builder
• PhD / Master in a relevant field (Robotics, Machine Learning) — exceptional candidates from other backgrounds welcome.
• Experience with sim-to-real transfer, world models, or large-scale robot data collection.
• Experience working on large code bases or large machine learning models at scale.
• Contributions to a large open-source or industry codebase.
• Publications in top academic journals or conferences.
• Enjoys improving existing code: typing, tests, CI pipelines.

What We Offer

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being, growth, and work-life balance. Benefits vary by country and may include healthcare coverage, parental leave, retirement plans, relocation support, wellness programs, meal and transportation allowances, and other location-specific perks.