← All roles

Inference Engineering and Product Lead

Modal· Engineering
Apply on company site
San Francisco$300k - $350kFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Lead the direction and execution of Modal's LLM inference platform, guiding a team of engineers across serving stack, routing infrastructure, internal optimization platform, and user-facing product surface area. Hands-on leadership role balancing technical contribution, product shaping, and people management.

Responsibilities

  • Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of 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, customer obsession, and continuous improvement.
  • Drive technical and product decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions.
  • Lead efforts working with customers with novel or frontier workloads so they can be successful running on Modal.
  • Translate learnings from frontier customers into a roadmap for internal optimization platform and user-facing product, so gains from optimization and research efforts are accessible to all users.
  • Establish standards for reliability and product excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from spec through production.
  • Partner with business operations and compute strategy on 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 infrastructure platform underlying inference, as well as adjacent product teams.

Qualifications

  • 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 engines, kernels, routing, KV cache management and speculative decoding.

Skills

Required:Leadership and people managementDistributed systemsCloud infrastructureLow-level OS fundamentals
Nice to have:Customer-facing technical leadership
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