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Modal is building a new infrastructure layer for AI—a serverless cloud platform for AI, data, and compute-intensive applications. The company recently raised $355M in Series C funding at a $4.65B valuation and has crossed $300M+ ARR, growing fivefold since September 2025. Customers include Lovable, Ramp, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno.
Modal's LLM inference platform delivers frontier performance for open-source models with best-in-class elasticity and developer experience, powered by custom runtime with GPU memory snapshots and multi-cloud substrate. You will lead the direction and execution of this platform to establish Modal as the clear market leader, working closely with frontier customers.
You'll lead a group of highly talented engineers working on Modal's market-leading LLM inference offering, spanning the serving stack, routing infrastructure, internal agentic optimization platform, and user-facing product surface area. This is a hands-on leadership role—you'll split time between technical contribution, product shaping, and people management based on team needs.
Responsibilities include:
**Team Leadership:** Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing engineering team. Run regular 1:1s focused on coaching, feedback, and career growth. Set clear performance expectations, maintain 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 efforts with customers running novel or frontier workloads on Modal. Translate learnings from frontier customers into a roadmap for the internal optimization platform and user-facing product. Establish standards for reliability and product excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end from spec through production.
**Cross-Functional Leadership:** Partner with business operations and compute strategy on developing strategy for compute purchases across accelerators. Collaborate with GTM on product launches, positioning, and improving win rates for inference opportunities. Help guide the roadmap for teams building the underlying infrastructure platform and adjacent product teams.
**Requirements:**
- 10+ years of industry experience, including 3+ years in a leadership role
- Track record building high-performance systems at scale
- Strong background in cloud infrastructure
- Deep knowledge of low-level OS foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
- Nice to have: Experience working with LLM inference in production and familiarity with underlying concepts like engines, kernels, routing, KV cache management, and speculative decoding
About Modal Labs
AI / Data / Infrastructure — serverless cloud platform for AI, data, and compute-intensive applications.
