> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt.

# Forward Deployed Engineer - ML

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/be717912a9d27a0d

Modal posts a FDE role to integrate and configure the product in New York, NY and 1 more, at $180,000–$250,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Architect and optimize production AI workloads for customers. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

- [Modal](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/modal)

Posted Feb 23, 2026 by Modal · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$180,000–$250,000** + equity New York, NY +1 On-site Full-time

Architect and optimize production AI workloads for customers.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fbe717912a9d27a0d&placement=top)
- [View posting at Modal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/9fadb51f-ce11-41b1-84d5-470e66cc8ee9/application)

Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so.

## At a glance

### Posted base pay

$180K–$250K Above the median

Midpoint $215K · median $190K

This job $180K to $250K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

### The work

Integrates and configures it

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

1. Pre-sales (not covered)
2. Proof of concept
3. Implementation
4. Operations (not covered)

- **Coding**: Writes production code

- **Builds for**: External customers

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **2+ years** professional ML engineering experience

Background

- **Software engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 2+ years. How many do you have?

The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now?

The job is in New York, NY · San Francisco, CA. Could you work in one of these?

Which of these have you used in production?

Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent.

[What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths)

## Conditions

- **Location**: New York, NY · San Francisco, CA

- **Work arrangement**: On-site

- **Remote work restrictions**: In person in New York City, San Francisco, or Stockholm

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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Sunnyvale, CA · San Francisco, CA 3mo ago

$182,000–$242,000

- [Other jobs at Modal (1)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/modal)

## The job description from Modal

Posted by Modal on Feb 23, 2026

### 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’re looking for Forward Deployed ML Engineers who want to work at the intersection of deep technical work and direct customer impact. As an ML FDE, you’ll partner with leading AI companies and foundation model labs to help them achieve state-of-the-art performance on their most demanding workloads: LLM serving, model training (SFT, RLHF), audio pipelines, scientific computing, and more. You’ll help teams reach outcomes most engineers can’t on their own.

The FDE team today includes world-class software engineers, computational scientists, ML engineers, and former founders. We’re looking for people with strong engineering fundamentals, deep curiosity across the AI stack, and energy for working directly with customers on hard problems.

### What You’ll Work On:

- Work hands-on with companies like Suno, Cognition, and Meta to architect and optimize production AI workloads on Modal
- Contribute to open-source projects (members of the team are active contributors to SGLang) and publish technical content that demonstrates Modal’s capabilities across the AI stack
- Collaborate with Modal’s product and sales teams, contributing to the platform as both an engineer and a product stakeholder
- Build trusted relationships with technical leaders (CTOs, VPs of Engineering, ML leads) at companies doing frontier AI work
- Conduct technical demos, experiments, and proofs of concept that make Modal’s performance advantages tangible

### You May Be a Fit If:

- You have 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience, ideally with hands-on work in inference optimization, model training, GPU programming, or ML infrastructure
- You’re familiar with the serving (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) and training (e.g., slime, verl, TRL) toolchains and can go deep on at least one (you don’t need all of them)
- You’re a strong communicator who can go deep on technical architecture with an engineering team and clearly articulate tradeoffs to technical leadership
- You have a genuine interest in working directly with customers: you find it energizing to understand someone else’s problem and help them solve it
- You’re willing to work in person in New York City, San Francisco, or Stockholm

### Nice-to-Have:

- Side projects, open-source contributions, or published work you’re proud of in ML or systems performance

[View posting at Modal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/9fadb51f-ce11-41b1-84d5-470e66cc8ee9/application)

## About Modal

Cloud infrastructure for AI workloads, giving developers code-first elastic CPUs, GPUs, storage, and secure runtimes for inference, training, agents, and batch jobs.

Series C · 100–200 people

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- [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior)
- [Similar jobs in New York metro](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=nyc-metro)
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