Customer Engineer
Application analysis
Customer Engineer at Modal is a forward deployed enterprise software role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Technical customer-facing role role centers on hands-on work with customers to ship and adopt technical products.
About Modal
Enterprise software forward deployed engineers drive adoption, integration, and measurable customer outcomes. The role is anchored in New York, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Stand out for Customer Engineer
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Customer Engineer to a specific customer or deployment you owned — Modal hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Mirror language from the job description in your examples — if they emphasize deployment, use deployment stories; if integration, use integration stories.
- Include a short “how I work with customers” section in your cover note: communication cadence, escalation instincts, and how you handle ambiguity.
- This role is tied to New York — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at Modal
- Demonstrate stakeholder management with a concrete example — Modal will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate integration skill with a concrete example — Modal will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Prepare stories that move from discovery → pilot → production with named outcomes.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on modal.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role 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 engineers with deep AI/ML and low-level systems experience who want to build the best technical support experience in the world. This isn't a traditional support role — it's an engineering role where you happen to be closest to our customers. You'll split your time roughly 50/50 between working directly with customers and shipping fixes, features, and automation that improve Modal for everyone. When you help a customer debug a training run, you'll also fix the underlying issue in the platform. When you notice ten customers hitting the same friction point, you'll build the tooling or automation that eliminates it entirely.
This role is for people who solve problems, not people who answer tickets. The problems you encounter are deeply technical and arise from running some of the most demanding AI workloads in the world. You'll be a member of our engineering team, contributing production code alongside the engineers building the core platform. The difference is that your roadmap is shaped by what you learn at the frontier of customer experience. You will:
- Ship code that matters. Fix bugs, build features, and create automation that improves the experience for every Modal user — not just the one who reported the issue.
- Work directly with customers. Help developers and ML engineers debug, optimize, and architect their workloads across Slack, email, and calls.
- Build scalable systems. Design tooling, dashboards, and automated workflows that make support efficient at scale — delighting customers at the most important moments.
- Close the feedback loop. Translate patterns you see in the field into concrete improvements — docs fixes, API changes, or new feature proposals.
- Contribute to open source and technical content. Write examples, build demos, and publish content that helps the broader community succeed on Modal.
Requirements:
- Accomplished in key areas. You bring depth in either low-level infrastructure or ML/AI, and you're not lost in the other.
- Low-level infrastructure experience. Operating systems, file systems, networking, performance profiling, cluster management and distributed systems.
- AI/ML engineering experience. Training models, optimizing inference, working with GPUs, or building ML infrastructure.
- Automation mindset. Your instinct when you see a manual process is to eliminate it and you have the engineering background to make that happen.
- Clear communicator. Can explain a systems issue to a customer, write a crisp bug report, and draft documentation, all while collaborating internally to ship improvements.