Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems

Department: Engineering

Location: New York, San Francisco

Compensation: $180K – $240K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Us:

Modal provides the infrastructure foundation for AI teams. With instant GPU access, sub-second container startups, and native storage, Modal makes it simple to train models, run batch jobs, and serve low-latency inference. We have thousands of customers who rely on us for production AI workloads, including Lovable, Scale AI, Substack, and Suno.

We're a fast-growing team based out of NYC, SF, and Stockholm. We've hit 9-figure ARR and recently raised a Series B at a $1.1B valuation. Our investors include Lux Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Amplify Partners, and Elad Gil.

Working at Modal means joining one of the fastest-growing AI infrastructure organizations at an early stage, with many opportunities to grow within the company. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g. Seaborn, 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