> 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 - Systems

Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c0acbfff78099976

Modal posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in New York, NY and 1 more, at $180,000–$240,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Architect and deploy production workloads for AI companies on Modal. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026.

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

Posted Sep 23, 2025 by Modal · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026

**$180,000–$240,000** + equity New York, NY +1 On-site Full-time

Architect and deploy production workloads for AI companies on Modal.

- [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fc0acbfff78099976&placement=top)
- [View posting at Modal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/cbbbee50-3d3b-4873-8ae8-ff4b885b8e54/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–$240K Above the median

Midpoint $210K · median $190K

This job $180K to $240K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K.

### The work

Builds what the customer runs

Balance **Mostly building**

Project stages

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

- **Coding**: Configuration only

- **Builds for**: External customers

- **Level**: Senior

- **Role**: Individual contributor

### What they ask for

Experience

- **3+ years** professional software engineering

Background

- **Software engineering**

### Do you meet what the posting states?

The posting asks for 3+ 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

- **Employment type**: Full-time

- **Pay**:

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

## The job description from Modal

Posted by Modal on Sep 23, 2025

### 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 Engineers on our engineering team who want to work at the intersection of deep infrastructure work and direct customer impact. As an FDE, you’ll partner with leading AI companies and foundation labs on cloud architecture, networking, storage, containerization, sandboxing, and more, helping them design and ship production infrastructure on Modal’s platform.

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 infrastructure stack, and energy for working directly with customers on hard problems.

### What You’ll Work On:

- Work hands-on with companies like Suno, Lovable, Cognition, and Meta to architect and deploy massive-scale production workloads on Modal
- Lead technical discovery and architecture sessions with prospective and existing customers
- Architect migration paths from existing cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure) to Modal’s serverless platform
- 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 infrastructure advantages tangible

### You May Be a Fit If:

- You have 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
- You have hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), including compute, storage, networking, and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- You’re familiar with distributed systems architecture, data pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
- You’re a strong communicator who can go deep on systems architecture with an infrastructure 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:

- Experience leading large-scale migration efforts, open-source contributions, or side projects you’re proud of

[View posting at Modal](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/modal/cbbbee50-3d3b-4873-8ae8-ff4b885b8e54/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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