Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems

Modal Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal Labs is looking for Forward Deployed Engineers to work at the intersection of infrastructure and direct customer impact in New York City. The role involves partnering with leading companies on cloud architecture and deploying large-scale production workloads.

The ideal candidate has 3+ years of software engineering experience, hands-on cloud platform skills, and is energized by solving customer problems. Collaboration with product teams and technical leaders is integral to the role.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms for compute, storage, networking.
• Familiarity with distributed systems architecture and data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Work hands-on with leading AI companies on infrastructure deployment.
• Lead architecture sessions with customers.
• Architect migration paths to Modal's serverless platform.
• Collaborate with product and sales teams.
• Build relationships with technical leaders at AI companies.
• Conduct technical demos and proof-of-concepts.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

Container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)

Distributed systems architecture

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi)

Strong communication skills

Job description

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