Systems Engineering Manager

The Role

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team of highly experienced engineers building the infrastructure that powers Modal's serverless GPU platform. This is a hands-on leadership role - expect to split your time between technical contribution and people management depending on what the team needs. You'll set direction, remove blockers, and build a strong engineering culture as your team tackles hard problems in distributed computing, large-scale data handling, and performance optimization.

Who You Are

• You're an experienced engineering leader who stays close to the work and builds alongside your team when it counts.
• You earn trust through technical depth, not title.
• You communicate clearly, help strong engineers move fast without cutting corners, and stay calm and pragmatic under pressure.
• You care as much about how your team gets to an answer as the answer itself.

Responsibilities

Team

• Recruit, hire, and grow a high-performing team of cloud platform engineers; run regular 1:1s focused on coaching, feedback, and career growth.
• Set clear performance expectations, hold a high bar, and build an environment where engineers do their best work.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Technical Direction

• Drive day-to-day technical decisions through design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions.
• Translate the infrastructure roadmap into clear team priorities and milestones, and hold execution against them.
• Establish standards for reliability, performance, and operational excellence; ensure the team owns projects end-to-end, from spec through production.
• Push for good judgment on tooling and architecture, with a bias against unnecessary complexity.

Cross-Functional & Incident Leadership

• Partner with product and engineering to align infrastructure work with business priorities; represent your team's progress, capacity, and tradeoffs clearly to leadership.
• Serve as the escalation point for major incidents; drive resolution with urgency and ensure the team learns systematically, feeding those learnings back into infrastructure improvements.

Requirements

• 10+ years of industry experience, including 3+ years in a leadership role
• Track record building high-performance distributed systems at scale
• Strong background in cloud infrastructure
• Deep knowledge of low-level OS foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, containers, etc.)
• Proficiency in a systems-level language (Rust, C, C++, or Java)