---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer - ML at Modal'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-ml-modal-new-york-bdfz27e2m21n'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer - ML at Modal

- **Company:** Modal
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-02-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/9fadb51f-ce11-41b1-84d5-470e66cc8ee9

## Job description

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 [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. 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 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. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. 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 ML Engineers who want to work at the intersection of deep technical work and direct customer impact. As an ML FDE, you'll partner with leading AI companies and foundation model labs to help them achieve state-of-the-art performance on their most demanding workloads — LLM serving, model training (SFT, RLHF), audio pipelines, scientific computing, and more. You're helping teams reach outcomes most engineers can't on their own. 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 AI 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 optimize production AI workloads on Modal
- Contribute to open-source projects — members of the team are active contributors to SGLang — and publish technical content that demonstrates Modal's capabilities across the AI stack
- 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 performance advantages tangible

Requirements:

- 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience, ideally with hands-on work in inference optimization, model training, GPU programming, or ML infrastructure
- Familiarity with the serving (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) and training (e.g., slime, verl, TRL) toolchains. You don't need all of these, but you should be able to go deep on at least one.
- Strong communicator who can go deep on technical architecture with an engineering 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: side projects, open-source contributions, or published work you're proud of in ML or systems performance
- Willing to work in-person in New York City, San Francisco, or Stockholm

## About Modal

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Modal provides high-performance AI infrastructure—a serverless, globally distributed GPU cloud for inference, training, sandboxes, and agent workloads.
- **Entity Type**: Private (raised over $466M, Series D from top-tier investors)
- **Headquarters**: New York, NY, USA (with offices in Stockholm, Sweden and San Francisco, CA, USA)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available in provided sources
- **Founders**: Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Cloud infrastructure / AI compute / Developer tools
- Target customers: Developers and engineering teams building AI/ML products (B2B, from startups to enterprises)
- Mission or purpose: “Make it easier to iterate and ship applications for data, AI, and machine learning” and “Make cloud development work like magic.”

## Products & Services
- **[Modal Runtime](https://modal.com/)** – Serverless container platform with custom file system, scheduler, and container image builder. Sub-second cold starts and instant autoscaling from 0 to 1000+ GPUs.
- **[Modal Sandboxes](https://modal.com/)** – Isolated, ephemeral environments for running untrusted code (e.g., coding agents, RL rollouts). Programmatically spin up fresh environments with custom images.
- **[Modal Inference](https://modal.com/)** – Globally distributed inference with sub-10ms overhead latency, support for token streaming, WebRTC, WebSocket. Supports LLMs, audio, image/video generation.
- **[Modal Training](https://modal.com/)** – Fine-tuning and multi-node training on H100s, A100s, B200s with gang scheduling and InfiniBand networking. Single line of code to scale from single-GPU to multi-node clusters.
- **[Modal Batch / Async Inference](https://modal.com/)** – Run evaluations, embeddings, re-ranking, dataset generation at scale, thousands of GPUs fully parallel.
- **[Modal SDK](https://modal.com/)** – Python SDK that lets developers define infrastructure and workloads in code, then ship to the cloud.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $4.65B (as of 2026, per [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-modal-2026))
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – over $466M (per [modal.com/company](https://modal.com/company))
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: General Catalyst, Redpoint Ventures, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners, Creandum (per [modal.com/company](https://modal.com/company))
- **Growth Signals**: ~150 employees (2026); global offices in New York, Stockholm, San Francisco; rapid hiring across engineering, GTM, and G&A roles; strong traction in inference, training, and agent infrastructure.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep infrastructure stack**: Custom file system, container runtime, scheduler, and image builder built from scratch to optimize AI workloads.
- **Developer experience**: “Stay in Python, ship to the cloud” – composable primitives that specify everything from logic to hardware in one code file.
- **Instant elasticity**: Scale from zero to 1000+ GPUs in seconds, pay only for compute used (no reserved capacity).
- **Global GPU access with low latency**: Sub-10ms overhead for online inference via globally distributed compute.
- **Compliance and security**: SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant, data residency controls, battle-tested isolation for untrusted code.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI-native runtime**: Deepening support for inference, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and agent workflows.
- **Scaling for agents**: Developing sandboxes and execution layers purpose‑built for interactive coding agents and long‑running RL rollouts.
- **Expanding global capacity**: Adding GPU availability across more regions, leveraging elastic cloud capacity.
- **Enterprise readiness**: Investing in security, governance, team controls, and data residency to serve larger customers.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture and team**: Founded by engineers who created open‑source tools (Seaborn, Luigi); team includes academic researchers, olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering leaders. Flat, high‑trust environment.
- **Location / flexibility**: Offices in New York, Stockholm, and San Francisco; likely hybrid/remote‑friendly (many roles list multiple locations).
- **Compensation and growth**: Transparent salary culture (as highlighted in 2026 profile); strong growth trajectory backed by $466M in funding and a $4.65B valuation.
- **Perks**: $30/month free compute for personal projects (customer benefit, likely similar for employees); focus on developer experience and “magic.”

## Sources
1. [modal.com](https://modal.com/)
2. [modal.com/company](https://modal.com/company)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal)
4. [linkedin.com/company/modal-labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/modal-labs)
5. [jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-modal-2026](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-modal-2026)

## Other roles at Modal

- [Member of Technical Staff - SDK (Stockholm)](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-sdk-stockholm-modal-stockholm-ks7rt2xw6atf) — Stockholm, Sweden
- [Talent Partner, Technical](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-partner-technical-modal-new-york-pyx4hkbcrzcb) — New York, NY
- [Talent Partner, GTM](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-partner-gtm-modal-san-francisco-1nm18692f4w7) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff - Inference Runtime](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-inference-runtime-modal-san-francisco-cvzk20vkphfy) — San Francisco, CA
- [Legal Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/legal-operations-lead-modal-new-york-s5y3gn1e961k) — New York, NY
- [Senior Commercial Counsel](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-commercial-counsel-modal-new-york-grh0fxqa82by) — New York, NY
- [Field Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/field-marketing-manager-modal-san-francisco-0apep5s9tyq6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Global Workplace Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/global-workplace-lead-modal-new-york-4vjzkq1xtb4h) — New York, NY
- [Analytics Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/analytics-engineer-modal-new-york-6t3v0rpsnf2z) — New York, NY
- [Member of Technical Staff - Lead, Storage](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-lead-storage-modal-san-francisco-3wd2wad5dheq) — San Francisco, CA