Forward-Deployed ML Engineer: Direct Customer Impact

FDE Times; Town of Tonawanda (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal is seeking Forward Deployed ML Engineers to work at the intersection of deep technical work and direct customer impact. As part of the FDE team, you will partner with leading AI companies to optimize state-of-the-art workloads—from LLM serving to model training and data pipelines—directly with customers.

The role emphasizes strong engineering fundamentals, curiosity across the AI stack, and energy for solving hard problems with customers on real-world workloads.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience, including inference optimization or model training.
• Ability to go deep on at least one toolchain.
• Strong communication with engineering teams and leadership.
• Willing to work in-person in NYC, SF, or Stockholm.

Responsibilities

• Work hands-on with customers to architect and optimize production AI workloads on Modal.
• Contribute to open-source projects and publish technical content.
• Collaborate with product and sales as engineer and product stakeholder.
• Build trusted relationships with technical leaders at frontier AI companies.
• Conduct demos, experiments, and proofs-of-concept showing Modal's performance advantages.

Skills

ML engineering

Inference optimization

GPU programming

Tools

vLLM

SGLang

slime

verl

TRL

Job description

Modal is seeking Forward Deployed ML Engineers to work at the intersection of deep technical work and direct customer impact. As part of the FDE team, you will partner with leading AI companies to optimize state-of-the-art workloads—from LLM serving to model training and data pipelines—directly with customers.

The role emphasizes strong engineering fundamentals, curiosity across the AI stack, and energy for solving hard problems with customers on real-world workloads.