Modal
Forward Deployed Engineer - ML
$180K–$250K
New York +2 · On-site · Full-time · Posted Feb 23, 2026
- Location
- New York
San Francisco
London - Experience
- 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience.
About the job
Partners with AI companies and foundation model labs to architect, optimize, and deploy production AI workloads on Modal.
What you'll do
- Architect and optimize production AI workloads, including inference, training, audio, and scientific computing.
- Conduct technical demos, experiments, and proofs of concept; contribute to open-source projects and technical content.
- Collaborate with product and sales teams and build relationships with technical leaders at customer companies.
What they ask for
- 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience.
- Familiarity with ML serving and training toolchains, with deep expertise in at least one.
- Strong technical communication skills and interest in working directly with customers.
- Willingness to work in person in New York City, San Francisco, or Stockholm.
Nice to have
- Side projects, open-source contributions, or published work in ML or systems performance.
Pay
USD 180K – 250K base salary
Tools
Modal, vLLM, SGLang, slime, verl, TRL
AI focus
Works on production AI workloads, including LLM serving, model training (SFT, RLHF), audio pipelines, scientific computing, inference optimization, GPU programming, and ML infrastructure.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative