Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineering
This is one of 17 engineering roles Modal has open, and one of 10 at staff level. It went up 10 months ago.
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 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've passed $1B in annualized run rate, up 15x from a year ago. In October 2026 we raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation.
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:
At Modal, we sell cloud services atop which our customers run their critical production systems. As a rapidly growing new cloud infrastructure company, we seek to improve our reliability dramatically while scaling the size of our platform, customer base, and team.
This role is for people who are deep systems thinkers, love stacking nines, and thrive on making others move faster at scale.
What You'll Work On:
Identify architectural changes to improve reliability and performance
Foster a culture of reliability across Modal’s engineering organization
Define and implement operational processes such as deployments and upgrades
Operate infrastructure like Kubernetes, Postgres, and Redis
Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents
You May Be a Fit If:
You have 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code
You have 2+ years of on-call experience for critical production services
You have strong cloud skills and deep familiarity with at least one hyperscaler cloud (AWS preferred)
You’re familiar with autoscaling, fleet management, and capacity planning at scale
You’ve operated databases, monitoring, CI/CD, and other infrastructure at scale
You’re able to work in person in our NYC or Stockholm offices
Nice-to-Have:
Experience owning and scaling Kubernetes clusters to thousands of nodes
Experience with systems safety research (e.g., STAMP) and control theory
Check your resume against this role
Drop your resume. You get a 0-100 fit score against the actual job description, plus the reasoning and the gaps worth closing first. Private to you.
Score this once, or every future role
Start the candidate journey and every new role on the board gets scored against you.
Five minutes. Tell us what you’re after, drop your resume once, pick how we should reach out. You get a candid read back and you only hear from us when a role fits.