engineering
Posted Sep 23, 2025Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems
at Modal
New York, United StatesOn-site
Requirements
- ABOUT US: AI needs a new infrastructure layer.
- AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now.
- They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale.
- As an FDE, you'll partner with leading AI companies and foundation labs on cloud architecture, networking, storage, containerization, sandboxing, and more — helping them design and ship production infrastructure on Modal's platform.
- The FDE team today includes world-class software engineers, computational scientists, ML engineers, and former founders.
- We're looking for people with strong engineering fundamentals, deep curiosity across the infrastructure stack, and energy for working directly with customers on hard problems.
- You will: - Work hands-on with companies like Suno, Lovable, Cognition, and Meta to architect and deploy massive-scale production workloads on Modal - Lead technical discovery and architecture sessions with prospective and existing customers - Architect migration paths from existing cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) to Modal's serverless platform - Collaborate with Modal's product and sales teams, contributing to the platform as both an engineer and a product stakeholder - Build trusted relationships
- experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) — compute, storage, networking, and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) - Familiarity with distributed systems architecture, data pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) - Strong communicator who can go deep on systems architecture with an infrastructure team and clearly articulate tradeoffs to technical leadership - Genuine interest in working directly with customers — you find it energizing to understand someone
- experience leading large-scale migration efforts, open-source contributions, or side projects you're proud of - Willing to work in-person in New York City, San Francisco, or Stockholm
Experience
- REQUIREMENTS: - 3+ years of professional software engineering experience - Hands-on
Benefits
- We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September.
Contact
- Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable https://modal.com/blog/lovable-case-study, Ramp https://modal.com/blog/how-ramp-built-a-full-context-background-coding-agent-on-modal, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno.
- We recently raised a $355M Series C https://modal.com/blog/modal-series-c at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures.
- Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g.,Seaborn https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn,Luigi https://github.com/spotify/luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.
Additional details
- Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud.
- Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade.
- THE ROLE: We're looking for Forward Deployed Engineers on our engineering team who want to work at the intersection of deep infrastructure work and direct customer impact.