Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems

The role

Forward Deployed Engineers partner with AI companies and foundation labs on cloud architecture, networking, storage, containerization, and sandboxing. You will help customers design and ship production infrastructure on Modal's platform.

What you will do

• Work hands-on with companies 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 to Modal's serverless platform
• Collaborate with product and sales teams as an engineer and product stakeholder
• Build trusted relationships with technical leaders at companies doing frontier AI work
• Conduct technical demos, experiments, and proofs of concept

Required qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with 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 and articulate tradeoffs to technical leadership
• Genuine interest in working directly with customers

Nice to have

• Experience leading large-scale migration efforts
• Open-source contributions
• Side projects you're proud of

About the company

Modal is building a new infrastructure layer for AI. The company has passed $1B in annualized run rate and includes creators of popular open-source projects and experienced engineering leaders.