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Modal

Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance

New York
Salary
$200K - $350K
Level
Staff

Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.

Open. First seen 14 March 2026.

Apply on the company's site →

About the role

Modal's standard text

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.

Modal's standard text

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 in making ML systems performant at scale. If you are interested in contributing to open-source projects and Modal’s container runtime to push language and diffusion models towards higher throughput and lower latency, we’d love to hear from you!

Requirements:

  • 5+ years of experience writing high-quality, high-performance code.
  • Experience working with torch, high-level ML frameworks, and inference engines (vLLM or TensorRT).
  • Familiarity with Nvidia GPU architecture and CUDA.
  • Experience with ML performance engineering (tell us a story about boosting GPU performance — debugging SM occupancy issues, rewriting an algorithm to be compute-bound, eliminating host overhead, etc).
  • Nice-to-have: familiarity with low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc).

What this role asks for

Particular to this role

CUDA

Rare in Modal's other 28 open postings.

Standard for data science / ML roles

Machine Learning

Common in data science / ML postings at any company.

In most of Modal's ads

Seaborn

Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.

53% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Modal's standard text, folded away below.

Read against Modal's other open postings on this site.

The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY

This role is one of 24 open in Engineering. 7 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in October: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.

WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS

Seaborn (24 of 24), Linux (11 of 24), Linux Kernel (10 of 24), Serverless (8 of 24), LLM (7 of 24), Rust (7 of 24), Golang (4 of 24)

OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM

From the team and dates on Modal's own job board.

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