Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems

Location: New York; San Francisco Workplace: OnSite ABOUT US: AI NEEDS A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER. WE'RE BUILDING IT AT MODAL. 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. 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. Our customers include category-defining companies like Ramp https://modal.com/blog/how-ramp-built-a-full-context-background-coding-agent-on-modal, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. 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. We've passed $1B in annualized run rate, up 15x from a year ago. In October 2026 we raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation. 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. 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. 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 with technical leaders (CTOs, VPs of Engineering, ML leads) at companies doing frontier AI work - Conduct technical demos, experiments, and proof-of-concepts that make Modal's infrastructure advantages tangible REQUIREMENTS: - 3+ years of professional software engineering experience - Hands-on 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 else's problem and help them solve it - Bonus: 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