Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems
Forward Deployed Engineer partners with AI companies to architect and deploy large-scale production workloads on Modal's serverless platform, leading technical discovery, migrations from AWS/GCP/Azure, and demos. Requires 3+ years software engineering with cloud, containers, and distributed systems expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Work hands-on with companies like Suno, Lovable, Cognition, and Meta to architect and deploy massive-scale production workloads on Modal's platform.
- 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.
Skills
AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Distributed Systems, Infrastructure As Code
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