Member of Technical Staff - Systems
At a glance
Senior Software Engineering role at Modal. New York · full-time · $220,000–$300,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Design, build and maintain the high-performance systems behind the serverless platform
- Write production code and help keep the platform’s systems reliable
- Improve system performance by finding and reducing sources of latency
- Take part in on-call coverage and respond when production incidents occur
What you bring
- At least five years writing production-quality software
- You have built distributed systems that perform well at large scale
- Strong cloud skills and a solid grasp of Linux, file systems or containers
- You have applied performance engineering to make systems faster
Who this fits
This senior engineering role suits someone focused on building and maintaining high-performance systems. You must work in person from the New York or San Francisco office and participate in on-call coverage.
From the employer
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:
We are looking for strong engineers with experience and interest in designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform.
You May Be a Fit If:
You have 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code
You’ve built high-performance distributed systems at a large scale (the more battle scars, the better)
You have strong cloud skills
You have strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
You have experience with performance engineering (tell us a story of when you shaved off a few milliseconds!)
You’re able to work in person in our NYC or SF office
You’re able to participate in our on-call rotation and respond to production incidents
Nice-to-Have:
Prior experience with Rust
Software Engineering work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.
Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.
Software Engineering$220k+
Find me workBy the team behind techroles.