Forward Deployed ML Engineer (London)

About the role

Modal builds an infrastructure layer for AI, offering instant GPU access, fast container starts and native storage for low-latency inference, model fine-tuning and production sandboxes. It is looking for Forward Deployed ML Engineers in London who want to combine deep technical work with direct customer impact. You will partner with leading AI companies and foundation model labs on demanding workloads such as LLM serving, model training (SFT, RLHF), audio pipelines and scientific computing.

Key responsibilities

• Work hands-on with companies such as Suno, Cognition and Meta to architect and optimize production AI workloads on Modal
• Contribute to open-source projects (team members are active contributors to SGLang) and publish technical content showing Modal's capabilities
• Collaborate with Modal's product and sales teams, acting as both engineer and product stakeholder
• Build trusted relationships with technical leaders (CTOs, VPs of Engineering, ML leads) at frontier AI companies
• Run technical demos, experiments and proofs of concept that show Modal's performance advantages

Required profile

• 2+ years of professional ML engineering experience, ideally in inference optimization, model training, GPU programming or ML infrastructure
• Familiarity with serving (e.g. vLLM, SGLang) and training (e.g. SLIME, Verl, TRL) toolchains, going deep on at least one
• Strong communicator able to explain technical architecture and trade-offs to engineering teams and technical leadership
• Genuine interest in working directly with customers
• Willingness to work in person in London

Nice to have: side projects, open-source contributions or published work in ML or systems performance.