{"id":3895541,"url":"https://alion.io/job/modal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london","title":"Forward Deployed Engineer - ML (London)","company":{"id":12985,"name":"Modal","domain":"modal.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/modal","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":43,"ghost_share":0.023,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":215,"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"junior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":2,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"RLHF","optional":false},{"name":"Seaborn","optional":false},{"name":"SFT","optional":false},{"name":"SGLang","optional":false},{"name":"TRL","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"Matplotlib","optional":true},{"name":"Transformers","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-06T21:24:50Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-06","last_verified_at":"2026-11-08T07:46:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":1},"description":"About Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal.\nEvery 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.\nOur 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.\nWe'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.\nOur 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.\nThe Role:\nWe’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.\nThe 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.\nWhat You’ll Work On:\nWork hands-on with companies like Suno, Cognition, and Meta to architect and optimize production AI workloads on Modal\n\nContribute 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\n\nCollaborate with Modal’s product and sales teams, contributing to the platform as both an engineer and a product stakeholder\n\nBuild trusted relationships with technical leaders (CTOs, VPs of Engineering, ML leads) at companies doing frontier AI work\n\nConduct technical demos, experiments, and proofs of concept that make Modal’s performance advantages tangible\n\nYou May Be a Fit If:\nYou have 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience, ideally with hands-on work in inference optimization, model training, GPU programming, or ML infrastructure\n\nYou’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)\n\nYou’re a strong communicator who can go deep on technical architecture with an engineering team and clearly articulate tradeoffs to technical leadership\n\nYou have a genuine interest in working directly with customers: you find it energizing to understand someone else’s problem and help them solve it\n\nYou’re willing to work in person in London\n\nNice-to-Have:\nSide projects, open-source contributions, or published work you’re proud of in ML or systems performance","description_format":"text","description_chars":3335,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":2,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","MLOps","AI Compute & Inference"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-06T23:06:05Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":1,"expected_fill_days":215,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early","comp:junior"],"computed_at":"2026-11-08T05:47:12Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/modal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/modal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-08T10:09:59Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":21931,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-09T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":12985},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=12985"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmodal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmodal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmodal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/modal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmodal-forward-deployed-engineer-ml-london"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3895541}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"modal.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3895541},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}