Modal
1 open Forward Deployed Engineer role at Modal. Curated with comp bands.
Comp on the board: $180K–$250K + equity.
On the board since Jul 2026 · still hiring
Our take
Why Modal
GPU-level performance work at frontier labs, and the FDE team ships open source — not slideware.
- FDE type
- Solutions engineering
- Travel
- Medium
- Comp
- Competitive
- Stage
- Growth-stage
A good fit if you're…
- Engineers who want real GPU/inference performance work
- People who'd rather ship open source than decks
- Those who want frontier-lab customers without joining a lab
What they do
Modal is a serverless compute platform for AI/ML workloads, reportedly at $300M+ ARR with 5x growth and a $4.65B Series C. Customers run inference and training on its infrastructure; its FDE team tunes those deployments and even contributes to open source like SGLang.
What “forward deployed” means here
This is unusually technical FDE work: GPU-level performance tuning for customers like Suno, Lovable, and Cognition, with the team shipping open source rather than slideware. Only ~2 years of ML is asked, so it rewards strong systems engineers over ML researchers.
Comp & leveling
The band is $180K–$250K plus equity. Mid-pack in cash for the tier, but the equity sits in a company with a $4.65B Series C and steep growth. On-site in New York or San Francisco, with a Stockholm option — one of the few seats with a European base.
Growth signals
$300M+ ARR, 5x growth, and a large Series C put Modal among the fastest-scaling AI-infra companies. Frontier-lab and hot-startup customers make the FDE seat a front-row view of how the best AI products run in production.
Analysis updated 2026-09-11
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