Member of Technical Staff - Platform Engineering
Modal Labs
New York · $220k–$300k a year · Posted January 19, 2026
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Pay compared with the market
This listing pays about $260,000 a year. Across 133 open member of technical staff listings that state pay, the middle half runs $215,000 to $270,000 and the median is $240,000. That is inside the middle half of those listings, 8% above the median.
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Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
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About the job
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:
At Modal, we sell cloud services atop which our customers run their critical production systems. As a rapidly growing new cloud infrastructure company, we seek to improve our reliability dramatically while scaling the size of our platform, customer base, and team.
This role is for people who are deep systems thinkers, love stacking nines, and thrive on making others move faster at scale.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON:
- Identify architectural changes to improve reliability and performance
- Foster a culture of reliability across Modal’s engineering organization
- Define and implement operational processes such as deployments and upgrades
- Operate infrastructure like Kubernetes, Postgres, and Redis
- Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents
YOU MAY BE A FIT IF:
- You have 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code
- You have 2+ years of on-call experience for critical production services
- You have strong cloud skills and deep familiarity with at least one hyperscaler cloud (AWS preferred)
- You’re familiar with autoscaling, fleet management, and capacity planning at scale
- You’ve operated databases, monitoring, CI/CD, and other infrastructure at scale
- You’re able to work in person in our NYC or Stockholm offices
NICE-TO-HAVE:
- Experience owning and scaling Kubernetes clusters to thousands of nodes
- Experience with systems safety research (e.g., STAMP) and control theory