Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance
Modal is hiring a Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance in New York, United States. It pays $200k-$350k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Modal.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The posting mentions vLLM among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a lead role.
- Modal has 42 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
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, 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,Luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience.
The Role:
We are looking for strong engineers with experience in making ML systems performant at scale. If you are interested in contributing to open-source projects and Modal’s container runtime to push language and diffusion models toward higher throughput and lower latency, we’d love to hear from you!
You May Be a Fit If:
You have 5+ years of experience writing high-quality, high-performance code
You’ve worked with torch, high-level ML frameworks, and inference engines (vLLM or TensorRT)
You’re familiar with NVIDIA GPU architecture and CUDA
You have experience with ML performance engineering (tell us a story about boosting GPU performance: debugging SM occupancy issues, rewriting an algorithm to be compute-bound, eliminating host overhead, etc.)
Nice-to-Have:
Familiarity with low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
How we rate this
Member of Technical Staff - ML Performance at Modal rates 96 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- What's a project where you used vLLM hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
- Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: vLLM. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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