Forward Software Engineer

About the role

ABOUT MISTRAL

Mistral provides full-stack AI solutions: from frontier models to developer tools, applications, and compute. We partner with enterprises tackling the hardest problems across high-stakes industries like finance, manufacturing, defense, healthcare, and the public sector, co-creating customized AI systems that they can run on their terms.

We are a dynamic, collaborative team passionate about AI and its potential to transform society. Our diverse workforce thrives in competitive environments and is committed to driving innovation. Our teams are distributed between Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. We are creative, low-ego and team-spirited.

ABOUT THE JOB

As a Forward Software Engineer, you will build the systems behind some of the hardest problems Mistral takes on.

You join our team of engineers in Applied AI. We gravitate towards hard problems, decide how to solve them, and ship fast. You work closely with our customer-facing teams, and what works goes into production with our customers and across the company. When a project needs it, you work directly on customer engagements.

We're looking for a strong software engineer who has shipped agentic or GenAI systems to production. You've felt the pain of agents that work in the demo and fall apart on real tasks: tool calls that fail silently, loops that never end, and quality that drifts after launch. That production depth is your edge. You build across the stack, and you'd rather ship a plain UI on a solid foundation than a polished UI on a fragile one.

You think like a founder. You start from the customer's problem, not the technology. You measure success by the value you deliver, and you care about building experiences people love to use. You like working at the edge of what AI can do today, and you push past it.

Your scope is end to end, from first prototype to production. You help set the standard for how the team builds agents that are reliable, observable, and safe to run against sensitive systems.

Security is a big part of where we're heading. If you're drawn to it, that's a strong plus. You might come from security with a real interest in AI engineering, or from AI engineering with a real interest in security. Both paths fit. Curiosity about how systems break, and a habit of learning fast from the people who know the domain, matter. Experience at a security company counts too.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

- Build AI systems end to end, from first prototype to production.

- Design the agent architecture: orchestration, tool use, memory, retrieval, and the interfaces between agents and the systems they act on.

- Build across the stack, from backend services and APIs to the interfaces people use to work with agents.

- Turn what works for one customer into patterns and platforms that work across many, without rebuilding each time.

- Make systems hold up under real load: throughput, latency, cost, and failure recovery are part of the design from the start.