Max Mynter - Full Stack Machine Learning Engineer
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Max Mynter,<br>09/25/2025
7974 Words, 39 Minutes<br>Becoming a Research Engineer at a Big LLM Lab -- 18 Months of Strategic Career Development<br>Note : This is also published on Substack (where you can give me your mail if you want emails whenever I publish something).<br>A couple of days ago, I signed as a research engineer with Mistral, one of the few ML foundation model labs with more than a billion-dollar funding.<br>My excitement on Twitter found quite some resonance — partly in the form of questions for advice.<br>Getting here was not an accident.<br>I have strategically worked towards this outcome for an extended period, and I have a few things to share about what worked for me.<br>In a sense, this blog post is a sequel to How to become an ML Engineer in 5 to 7 steps, where I covered my self-taught path toward becoming a machine learning engineer from a non-CS (though STEM) background.<br>Here, I outline how I worked towards what I hope will be a career-defining role.<br>I started this work after working in my first ML position for about a year.<br>This is an account of my personal experiences, which I based on advice I got from friends and found online.<br>I don’t claim it’s original, and my sample is n=1, so cherry-pick what resonates for you.<br>I still hope some find it useful.<br>Now, without further ado, what follows is a discussion of<br>Tactic and Strategy<br>My Personal Timeline<br>Defining the Goal<br>The Application Playbook<br>Networks<br>Career Momentum<br>Application Process Touch Points Referrals<br>CV<br>Initial Screen<br>Takehomes<br>Online Assessment<br>Programming Interview<br>System Design Interview<br>Culture Fit<br>Quiz Interview<br>Hiring Manager / CTO Interview<br>Reference Check
The Mindgame<br>Conclusion<br>Tactic and Strategy<br>To improve my chances of getting a career inflecting role, I think there are two different kinds of useful actions you can take: strategic and tactical ones.<br>Tactical actions are relatively low effort, but with a high return in your specific situation.<br>This may be reading up on the latest news on the company you are interviewing with, doing a couple of LeetCode problems to refresh muscle memory, doing mock interviews, or polishing your CV.<br>Strategic actions are high effort, high return actions that may even seem fruitless in the specific moment, but in aggregate and compounding, give you a substantial advantage.<br>Think about learning a new technology deeply by building a substantial portfolio project, having significant tenure at a reputable organization, building and maintaining a network, or building a personal brand by talking about your work.<br>In the long run, it’s strategy that makes a successful career.<br>But in each moment, there is often significant value in tactical work.<br>Being prepared makes a good impression, and failing to get career-defining opportunities just because LeetCode is annoying is short-sighted.<br>Most advice for the application playbook and company touch points is tactical.<br>However, to get interviews, networking, strategic skill development, and communication are helpful.<br>This is what I cover in the networking and career momentum sections.<br>Being clear about goals is necessary to develop an effective strategy and to get into situations where tactics even matter.<br>If that sounds rather abstract, the discussion of my personal timeline may be helpful to illustrate the difference.<br>My Personal Timeline<br>In total, landing what I hope will become a career-defining position at Mistral was an 18-month effort.<br>This includes alternating phases of strategic and tactical work.<br>It was around April 2024 when I decided I wanted to step up in my career.<br>First, I sought out a career discussion with my direct manager.<br>More responsibility or concrete growth trajectories could have been an immediate and relatively low-threshold way to achieve my goal.<br>However, it became clear that there was no short-term or even mid-term way to grow with my responsibilities.<br>This is when I started to clarify my goals.<br>If I had to change, where to?<br>I was reaching out to friends and used my network to talk to people working in big tech companies, start-ups, scale-ups, FAANG, Big Labs, whatever seemed interesting, and where I could get an introduction.<br>My questions were always similar.<br>How did they like their current position?<br>Do they learn a lot, and what are the growth trajectories?<br>How much work do they have to do? What are the necessary skills, impressive portfolio projects, and what else is necessary to land a similar position?<br>As a result, I kicked off the first phase of strategic skill development.<br>I invested many hours into LeetCode prep and got a bunch of textbooks to catch up on relevant CS fundamentals; most notably distributed systems, data structures, and algorithms.<br>It became tactical a couple of months later.<br>I sent my first application in August of 2024 and did pretty well in the process.<br>However, after six rounds and around November, I didn’t make the cut and was quite...