Systems Engineering Manager

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:

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a group of highly experienced engineers. This is a hands-on leadership role where you’ll spend roughly half your time on technical contribution and half on people management, depending on the need. You’ll work closely with the team to set direction, remove blockers, and foster a strong engineering culture as they tackle complex systems challenges in distributed computing, large-scale data handling, and performance optimization.

YOU MAY BE A FIT IF:

- You have at least 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years in a leadership role

- You’ve built high-performance distributed systems at a large scale

- You have a strong background in cloud infrastructure

- You have strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)

- You’re proficient in systems-level languages such as Rust, C, C++, or Java

- You’re an experienced engineering leader who thrives close to the work and enjoys building alongside your team when needed

- You earn trust through technical depth, communicate with clarity, and help great engineers move fast and make sound decisions

- You thrive in a fast-paced environment and are pragmatic, calm under pressure, and focused on impact