Member of Technical Staff - Machines

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal seeks engineers to design, build, and maintain the machines layer—the fleet of bare metal and cloud hosts that run every Function, Sandbox, and training job. You will automate capacity integration from hardware providers, audit hardware and GPU setups, and manage machine images, kernels, and network configurations.

You will diagnose issues across layers, including kernel panics and container runtimes, and participate in on-call rotations to keep production healthy.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience writing production-grade code.
• Experience operating fleets of bare metal hardware or building control planes.
• Strong cloud skills across providers and services.
• Solid knowledge of Linux kernel, drivers, networking and containers.
• Proven ability to debug across layers and handle on-call incidents.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain Modal's machines layer for hosts and provisioning.
• Automate integration of new capacity from hardware providers.
• Audit and benchmark hosts, GPUs, networking, and storage; maintain images.
• Diagnose issues from kernel panics to container runtime problems.
• Respond to production incidents during on-call rotations.

Skills

Production code

Bare metal provisioning

Cloud infrastructure

Linux kernel & networking

Python

On-call rotation

Tools

Go

NVIDIA GPU stack

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, Ramp, 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 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,Luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.

The Role:

We are looking for strong engineers with experience and interest in designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform. Specifically, you'll be working on Modal's machines layer: the fleet of bare metal and cloud hosts that every Function, Sandbox, and training job runs on, and the control plane that provisions, images, monitors, and repairs them. You'll automate the integration of new capacity from a growing set of hardware providers; from auditing and benchmarking hosts and clusters, to maintaining our machine images, configuring GPUs, RDMA, networking, and storage, and getting machines into production. You'll build the automation that keeps the fleet healthy without human intervention: detecting bad GPUs, thermals, and disks. You'll dig into whatever is between the hardware and the software that runs on top of it, whether that is a kernel panic, a broadcast storm during boot, or getting our container runtime to run on new architectures and platforms.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code

• Experience operating fleets of physical hardware (bare metal provisioning, BMC/IPMI, PXE or network boot, firmware) or building the control planes that manage them (the more challenges you've worked through, the better)

• Strong cloud skills

• Strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, drivers, networking, file systems, containers, etc.)

• Effective at debugging across layers, from BGP flapping, Linux RPS, and vBIOS bugs to a Python control-plane service

• Willingness to step into the thick of it with our on-call rotation and respond to production incidents

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience with GPUs and the NVIDIA software stack in production (drivers, health monitoring, XIDs, RDMA/NVLink)

• Prior experience with Go

Key Things the Team Is Working On:

• Automatic remediation of unhealthy machines (power cycling, reimaging, GPU recovery) to maximize uptime and minimize operator toil.

• Automatic integration of new CPU, GPU, and storage servers into the fleet while managing hardware and network heterogeneity.

• Network health monitoring and reliability across many datacenters, and standardization of bare metal network configuration.

• Automatic hardware acceptance testing and benchmarking (CPU, disk, GPU, interconnect, network).

• Custom network bootloader, machine image pipeline, and kernel and firmware management across the fleet.