# Forward Deployed Engineer - Systems at Modal

- Company: Modal
- What the company does: Bring your own code, and run CPU, GPU, and data-intensive compute at scale. The serverless platform for AI and data teams. Backed by Accel, General Catalyst and AI Grant.
- Company website: https://modal.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: New York
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $180K to $240K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2025-09-23
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/cbbbee50-3d3b-4873-8ae8-ff4b885b8e54
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/modal-forward-deployed-engineer-systems/

## About the role

We're looking for Forward Deployed Engineers on our engineering team who want to work at the intersection of deep infrastructure work and direct customer impact. As an FDE, you'll partner with leading AI companies and foundation labs on cloud architecture, networking, storage, containerization, sandboxing, and more — helping them design and ship production infrastructure on Modal's platform.

## What they're looking for

- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) — compute, storage, networking, and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with distributed systems architecture, data pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
- Strong communicator who can go deep on systems architecture with an infrastructure team and clearly articulate tradeoffs to technical leadership
- Genuine interest in working directly with customers — you find it energizing to understand someone else's problem and help them solve it
- Bonus: experience leading large-scale migration efforts, open-source contributions, or side projects you're proud of

Tags: Engineering