Infrastructure Security Engineer
- Salary
- $150K - $270K
- Level
- Mid
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 8 May 2026.
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’re looking for an Infrastructure Security Engineer to design and secure the core systems that power our platform. This role focuses on building security directly into our infrastructure—from container isolation and orchestration to identity and secrets management in a multi-tenant, cloud-native environment.
You’ll work closely with engineering teams to define secure primitives and ensure our platform is resilient, scalable, and trustworthy by design.
This is a hands-on, deeply technical role focused on real systems, not compliance or policy.
What You'll Do:
Platform & Runtime Security
- Design and improve isolation mechanisms for multi-tenant workloads (containers, sandboxing, execution environments)
- Strengthen boundaries between customers, workloads, and internal systems
- Identify and mitigate risks in distributed, dynamic compute environments
Container & Orchestration Security
- Secure and harden containerized workloads and orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes or similar)
- Improve workload isolation, scheduling boundaries, and runtime protections
- Evaluate tradeoffs in multi-tenant execution models
Identity & Access Management
- Design and improve authentication and authorization systems across services
- Implement strong service-to-service identity and least-privilege access patterns
- Improve access controls across infrastructure and internal systems
Secrets & Key Management
- Build and maintain systems for securely managing secrets, tokens, and credentials
- Improve rotation, auditing, and access controls
- Reduce secret sprawl and integrate secure patterns into developer workflows
Cloud & Infrastructure Security
- Secure cloud environments across providers (AWS, GCP, etc.) with a focus on consistency and portability
- Improve network boundaries, service segmentation, and access controls
- Embed security into infrastructure-as-code and deployment systems
Engineering Partnership
- Work closely with product and infrastructure teams to design secure systems from the ground up
- Review architecture and code for security risks and provide actionable guidance
- Identify patterns in risks and drive cross-cutting improvements
Requirements:
Core Experience
- Experience securing cloud-native infrastructure and distributed systems in production
- Background in infrastructure, backend, or security engineering
- Experience working in multi-tenant or high-scale environments
Technical Depth
- Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration systems (e.g., Kubernetes or similar)
- Experience designing or securing isolation mechanisms in multi-tenant systems
- Solid understanding of authentication, authorization, and service identity models
- Experience with secrets management and secure handling of credentials
- Strong foundation in networking concepts (segmentation, service communication, access boundaries)
Mindset
- Builder mentality, you design and implement, not just review
- Pragmatic approach to security in fast-moving environments
- Comfortable working deeply with engineers and influencing system design
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with sandboxing or runtime isolation technologies (e.g., gVisor, Firecracker, seccomp, or similar)
- Familiarity with kernel-level or low-level isolation primitives
- Experience securing Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems in production
- Background in developer infrastructure, compute platforms, or multi-tenant systems
What this role asks for
Particular to this role
GCP · Kubernetes
Rare in Modal's other 28 open postings.
Standard for security roles
AWS
Common in security postings at any company.
In most of Modal's ads
Seaborn
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
77% 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
- IT Lead posted Oct 15
- Member of Technical Staff - Storage (Stockholm) posted Oct 14
- Member of Technical Staff - SDK (Stockholm) posted Oct 7
- Member of Technical Staff - Inference Runtime posted Oct 5
- Member of Technical Staff - Machines posted Sep 22
- Member of Technical Staff - Storage posted Sep 22
- Documentation Engineer posted Sep 21
- Inference Engineering and Product Lead posted Sep 16
- Detection and Response Engineer posted Aug 17
- ML Research Intern posted Jul 28
- Member of Technical Staff - Research, Post-Training posted Jul 5
- Member of Technical Staff - Research, Inference posted Jul 5
- Systems Engineering Manager posted May 19
- Member of Technical Staff - Product (Growth) posted May 18
- Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance posted Apr 21
- Forward Deployed Engineer - ML posted Feb 23
- Systems Engineering Manager posted Feb 3
- Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineering posted Jan 19
- Member of Technical Staff - Systems posted Jan 12
- Member of Technical Staff - Product (Backend) posted Jan 9
- Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems posted Sep 23
- Member of Technical Staff - SDK posted Aug 22
- Member of Technical Staff - Systems posted Oct 23
From the team and dates on Modal's own job board.
See Security Engineer salaries in New York →
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