Founding Team Lead Applied Science, South Korea

About The Job

We are seeking a senior technical science and business leader to lead our rapidly expanding Applied Science team. You will drive innovative research and collaborate with clients on the most complex research projects, using real-world data to solve real problems.

You will lead the development of SOTA models across different modalities such as text, image, and speech. By developing novel methods and research ideas you will apply these models across a diverse set of use cases and domains. Working cross-functionally with both external and internal science, engineering, and product teams you will deliver high-impact AI solutions that move the needle. Our team is made of world-class researchers, engineers, product builders, and ex-founders who love tackling the most complex real world problems in the industry.

As the leader of Applied Science for Mistral, you will engage C-suite stakeholders from major enterprises, evangelizing and articulating the value proposition of Mistral in the local market. You will build a strong team, and a lasting team culture, to create a powerful talent flywheel.

What you will do

• Lead the technical execution of high-stakes frontier science projects.
• Leading teams and strategic initiatives in the Applied Science team, defining team culture
• Be the point of contact internally and externally for technical Applied Science projects in the local region. This includes: leading the pre- and post-sales technical scoping, running events, engaging executive stakeholders, and ensuring projects align with the long-term vision of Applied Science at Mistral.
• Run pre-training, post-training and deploy state of the art models on clusters with thousands of GPUs.
• Work across a diverse set of complex real world problems such as robotics, engineering, finance, cybersecurity, physics and more.
• Generate and curate data for pre-training and post-training, working on evaluations and making sure the model's performance beats customer expectations and frontier benchmarks.
• Develop the necessary tools and frameworks to facilitate data generation, model training, evaluation and deployment.

About you

• You are fluent in English and Korean, and have excellent communication skills. You are at ease explaining complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• You have experience leading a technical AI, science or engineering team. Balancing technical IC work with team leadership and stakeholder management.
• Expert with PyTorch or JAX.
• 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 and high autonomy.
• 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
• Loves to build a dynamic, hard-working and exciting team culture
• PhD / Master in a relevant field (Mathematics, Physics, Machine Learning) — exceptional candidates from other backgrounds welcome.
• Research experience in agents, multimodal models, world models, robotics, diffusion models, cybersecurity, 3D understanding/generation, or time-series analysis.
• 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.