Member of Technical Staff - Product (Backend)

Job description

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 Lovable https://modal.com/blog/lovable-case-study, 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 recently raised a $355M Series C https://modal.com/blog/modal-series-c at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. 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 strong backend engineers who love building a developer tools used by the largest AI companies in the world. You’ll be building for things at scale, but also for new AI workflows that change every day. REQUIREMENTS: - Experience building and shipping modern web applications end-to-end. We care more about what you’ve built than how many years you’ve been building. - Comfort working across the stack: TypeScript on the frontend, Python services on the backend, and ClickHouse for data and analytics. - Deep knowledge of observability tools and patterns used for large-scale workloads such as custom sandboxes, training and inference for large language (LLM) and diffusion models. - Experience with at least one of: billing/payments systems, B2B SaaS tooling, or enterprise software, or LLM / diffusion models inference and training loads. - Strong product instincts; you think about customer problems, not just tickets. - Ability to participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents. - Ability to make good tradeoffs between shipping fast and building for scale. - Ability to work in-person in our NYC or SF office.