← All roles

Systems Engineering Manager

Modal· Engineering
Apply on company site
New York$275k - $330kFull-timePosted 8mo ago

About the role

Engineering Manager to lead a team building Modal's serverless GPU infrastructure. Hands-on leadership with technical contribution, focusing on distributed systems, large-scale data handling, and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

  • Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of cloud platform engineers; run regular 1:1s focused on coaching, feedback, and career growth.
  • Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and build an environment where engineers do their best work.
  • Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
  • Drive day-to-day technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions.
  • Translate the infrastructure roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold execution against them.
  • Establish standards for reliability, performance, and operational excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from spec through production.
  • Push for good judgment on tooling and architecture, with a bias against unnecessary complexity.
  • Partner with product and engineering to align infrastructure work with business priorities; represent your team's progress, capacity, and tradeoffs clearly to leadership.
  • Serve as the escalation point for major incidents; drive resolution with urgency and ensure the team learns systematically, feeding those learnings back into infrastructure improvements.

Qualifications

  • 10+ years of industry experience, including 3+ years in a leadership role
  • Track record building high-performance distributed systems at scale
  • Strong background in cloud infrastructure
  • Deep knowledge of low-level OS foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
  • Proficiency in a systems-level language (Rust, C, C++, or Java)

Skills

Required:Distributed systemsCloud infrastructureLinux kernel / OS foundationsSystems programming
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
Modal logo

About Modal

High-performance AI infrastructure

Bring your own code, and run CPU, GPU, and data-intensive compute at scale. The serverless platform for AI and data teams.

AI infrastructureBatchGPU scalingInferenceML workloadNotebooksObservabilityPlatform
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at Modal