Systems Engineering Manager
At a glance
Manager-level Engineering Leadership role at Modal. New York · full-time · $275,000–$330,000 base.
techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Lead engineers building cloud infrastructure, balancing hands-on technical work with coaching and people management
- Set team priorities from the infrastructure roadmap, then track delivery against milestones
- Guide technical choices through design and code reviews, with standards for reliability, performance and operational quality
- Coordinate infrastructure work with product and engineering, and communicate progress, capacity and tradeoffs to leaders
- Lead major incident response, then turn lessons into improvements to the infrastructure
What you bring
- At least ten years in industry, including three or more years leading people
- A record of delivering distributed systems at scale and a strong cloud infrastructure background
- Deep understanding of Linux internals, file systems, containers or related operating-system foundations
- Proficiency in Rust, C, C++ or Java, with the technical depth to contribute alongside your team
Who this fits
This hands-on manager role suits an experienced engineering leader who can guide strong engineers while staying close to technical work. The position is based in New York.
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’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team of highly experienced engineers building the infrastructure that powers Modal’s serverless GPU platform. This is a hands-on leadership role. Expect to split your time between technical contribution and people management depending on what the team needs. You’ll set direction, remove blockers, and build a strong engineering culture as your team tackles hard problems in distributed computing, large-scale data handling, and performance optimization.
What You’ll Work On:
Team
Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of cloud platform engineers; run regular 1:1s focused on coaching, feedback, and career growth
Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and build an environment where engineers do their best work
Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement
Technical Direction
Drive day-to-day technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions
Translate the infrastructure roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold execution against them
Establish standards for reliability, performance, and operational excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from spec through production
Push for good judgment on tooling and architecture, with a bias against unnecessary complexity
Cross-Functional & Incident Leadership
Partner with product and engineering to align infrastructure work with business priorities; represent your team’s progress, capacity, and tradeoffs clearly to leadership
Serve as the escalation point for major incidents; drive resolution with urgency and ensure the team learns systematically, feeding those learnings back into infrastructure improvements
You May Be a Fit If:
You have 10+ years of industry experience, including 3+ years in a leadership role
You have a track record of building high-performance distributed systems at scale
You have a strong background in cloud infrastructure
You have deep knowledge of low-level OS foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
You’re proficient in a systems-level language (Rust, C, C++, or Java)
You’re an experienced engineering leader who stays close to the work and builds alongside your team when it counts
You earn trust through technical depth, not title
You communicate clearly, help strong engineers move fast without cutting corners, and stay calm and pragmatic under pressure
You care as much about how your team gets to an answer as about the answer itself
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