Founding Team Lead Applied AI Engineer, Infra/DevOps - South Korea

About The Job

Mistral AI is seeking a founding Team Lead of our Applied AI Engineering Deployment team in Korea. The Applied AI Engineering Deployment team is focused on DevOps to facilitate the adoption of its products among customers and collaborate with them to address complex technical challenges. This is a player-coach role with roughly 70% hands-on technical work, and 30% people leadership.

Applied AI Engineers, Deployment at Mistral AI work directly with customers to quickly understand their greatest challenges and design and implement AI solutions. In this role, you’ll apply your problem-solving ability, creativity, and technical skills to help organizations use AI to drive real impact in the world. You’ll have the opportunity to gain rare insight into and contribute to some of the most important industries and institutions globally!

Applied AI Engineers, Deployment responsibilities look similar to those of a startup CTO: you’ll work in small teams and own end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects. A day might span discussing architecture with fellow engineers, wrangling massive-scale data, coding a custom web app, speaking with customer executives, or establishing a strategy for the Applied Engineering team.

What you will do

• You’ll be responsible for onboarding customers on our products, providing guidance on deployment and integration, and ensuring the best production setup from the low-level GPU stack up to infrastructure, back-end and front-end interfaces.
• You’ll work on deploying state-of-the-art AI applications from consumer products to industrial use cases, driving with our customers a crucial technological transformation.
• You’ll work in collaboration with our researchers, other AI engineers, and product engineers on our most complex customer projects involving deployment, scaling, and contributing to our open-source codebases for tasks such as inference and fine-tuning.
• You’ll be involved in pre-sales calls to understand potential clients' needs, challenges, and aspirations. You will provide technical guidance on our products and explain Mistral technologies to various stakeholders.
• You’ll be the people lead for the Applied AI Engineering Deployment Team in South Korea. You will mentor and grow your direct reports, and help shape the Applied AI Engineering practice in Korea, and APAC.

About you

• You are fluent in English and Korean
• You hold a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• You have 8+ years of experience in engineering, with a strong DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering background
• You have experience leading, mentoring, or managing engineers. Formal direct reports or informal technical leadership both count
• You are comfortable being a founding lead in a new location: ambiguity, setting norms, and working across time zones
• You're experienced with deploying and managing AI-based products in production environments
• You are fluent in Python
• You have experience with containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• You have experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment tools
• You have deep understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and on-premises infrastructure
• You are experienced with infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible
• You hold strong communication skills with an ability to explain complex technical concepts in simple terms to technical and non-technical audiences

Ideally you have

• Experience as a Customer Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Technical Product Manager
• Familiarity with AI frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Contributions to open-source projects, particularly in the space of DevOps or AI

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.