About this role
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 https://modal.com/blog/how-ramp-built-a-full-context-background-coding-agent-on-modal, 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 https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn,Luigi https://github.com/spotify/luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.
THE ROLE:
Modal's LLM inference platform delivers frontier performance https://modal.com/blog/kimi-k3-by-moonshot-now-available-on-modal for open-source models with best-in-class elasticity and developer experience, made in part possible by our custom runtime with GPU memory snapshots https://modal.com/blog/gpu-mem-snapshots and multi-cloud substrate https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver.
We're looking for a leader to own the direction and execution of this platform to continue to establish us as the clear market leader, working closely with customers like Cognition, Doordash, Ramp, and many more. You'll be leading a group of highly talented engineers working on our market-leading LLM inference offering, spanning the serving stack, routing infrastructure, internal agentic optimization platform, and the user-facing product surface area.
This is a hands-on leadership role — expect to split your time between technical contribution, product shaping 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, frontier inference serving, and performance optimization.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Team
- Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of 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, customer obsession, and continuous improvement.
Technical and Product Direction
- Drive technical and product decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions.
- Lead our efforts wo