About this role
Infrastructure builders who thrive at the intersection of high-performance distributed systems and petabyte-scale storage will find a natural home in this role. Modal is developing the foundational computing layer for artificial intelligence, delivering instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage for prominent technology companies.
As the lead for the storage team, the chosen engineer will guide the design and maintenance of the distributed object storage system that underpins container images, volumes, and checkpoints across hundreds of petabytes of data. This person will balance durability, latency, throughput, and cost while setting technical direction for primitives used by filesystems, training, and sandbox teams. The position requires managing three to eight engineers while remaining hands-on with low-level operating system foundations and distributed storage architectures.
What you will do
- Lead a team of engineers designing, building, and maintaining the distributed object storage system underpinning the serverless platform.
- Set technical direction for storage primitives that other internal teams build upon, balancing durability, latency, throughput, and cost.
- Own the roadmap for storage challenges including petabyte-scale garbage collection, active-active replication, and upstream rate limiting.
- Manage a team of three to eight engineers through project planning, growth, and performance conversations.
- Remain hands-on across the stack from local disk and page cache to distributed blob storage and garbage collection.
- Guide observability, automation, and on-call practices to maintain system health during rapid growth.
What you need
- Bring seven or more years of experience writing high-quality production code.
- Possess at least three years of direct people management experience leading engineers through project planning, growth, and performance management.
- Demonstrate experience building high-performance distributed storage or caching systems at large scale.
- Show strong cloud skills with deep familiarity with object storage like S3, CDNs, and their consistency, throughput, and cost characteristics.
- Have strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations including the Linux kernel, file systems, page cache, and containers.
- Bring experience with replication, content addressing, and consistency models in multi-region or multi-cloud systems.
- Demonstrate a track record of setting technical direction, driving architectural decisions, and building dependency primitives for other teams.
- Maintain a willingness to participate in the on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.
Nice to have
- Experience with data engineering at petabyte-scale.
- Prior experience with Rust
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What kind of data scale does the storage system handle?
The storage system manages hundreds of petabytes of data. This data is replicated across multiple cloud object stores and a CDN, cached on local NVMe across a large fleet of workers in many datacenters, and shared peer-to-peer within each datacenter.
What does the management component of this role entail?
This position involves managing a team of 3 to 8 engineers. The responsibilities include guiding team members through project planning, professional growth, and performance conversations.
Will this role require hands-on technical work alongside management?
Yes, the lead will stay hands-on across the stack. This includes working with local disk, page cache, distributed blob storage, and garbage collection, as well as participating in the on-call rotation.
What are some of the current technical projects for the team?
The team is currently working on peer-to-peer sharing of data across workers within a single datacenter to reduce ingress. Other active projects include replicating data across multiple blob storage providers, automating garbage collection across petabytes of data, and deploying colocated storage clusters.