Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems

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.