Member of Technical Staff - Systems

modal; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal is seeking experienced engineers to design, build, and maintain its novel high-performance serverless platform. You will write production code, tackle distributed systems at scale, and sharpen latency through performance engineering.

This role requires in-person work in NYC or SF, strong cloud skills, and a solid grasp of Linux kernel and containers. Prior Rust experience is a plus but not required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code.
• Experience building high-performance distributed systems at a large scale.
• Strong cloud skills.
• Strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.).
• Experience with performance engineering (tell us a story of when you shaved off a few milliseconds!).
• Ability to work in-person in our NYC or SF office.
• Prior experience with Rust is nice to have, but not required.
• Ability to participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-performance distributed serverless platform components.
• Collaborate with infra and product teams to optimize for low latency.
• Respond to production incidents and participate in on-call rotations.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud

Operating systems fundamentals

Performance engineering

On-call readiness

Tools

Rust

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.

Requirements:

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

• Experience building high-performance distributed systems at a large scale (the more battle scars, the better)

• Strong cloud skills

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

• Experience with performance engineering (tell us a story of when you shaved off a few milliseconds!)

• Ability to work in-person in our NYC or SF office.

• Prior experience with Rust is nice to have, but not required.

• Ability to participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.