Member of Technical Staff – Inference Runtime

Modal Labs

. Build production runtime infrastructure in Rust and Go .

Posted 10/5/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • United StatesLead💰 $220,000 - $300,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates strong expertise in Linux systems, particularly in processes, virtual memory, and filesystems, while proficiently building and debugging container runtimes and low-level infrastructure using Rust and Go. Capable of optimizing performance through effective debugging and system design across complex production environments.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Linux Systems KnowledgeRust ProgrammingGo ProgrammingContainer Runtime DevelopmentPerformance Optimization

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Linux Kernel DevelopmentContainer RuntimesDebuggingPerformance ProfilingMemory ManagementI/O OptimizationSystem CallsVirtualizationMulti-GPU SystemsCheckpoint/Restore Systems

Soft Skills

Problem SolvingCollaborationOwnership

Tools & Technologies

GVisorCUDAROCmRDMAFUSEEROFSDirect I/OMmapOverlay FilesystemsStorage Engines

Industry Keywords

High-Performance NetworkingMachine LearningOpen-Source ContributionsSandboxingDevice Proxying

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

LinuxRustGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Build production runtime infrastructure in Rust and Go
Diagnose difficult Linux and performance problems
Help determine the architecture of Modal’s container platform
Work closely with gVisor maintainers and contribute to the runtime upstream when appropriate
Make container startup, checkpoint, and restore faster for large inference and training workloads
Build multi-GPU and accelerator-aware snapshotting, including GPU memory and RDMA-enabled workloads
Design zero-copy and low-copy data paths between container memory, filesystems, storage, and Modal’s runtime
Optimize snapshot pipelines using parallel uploads, direct I/O, incremental snapshots, and efficient memory handling
Improve container image and filesystem performance across EROFS, FUSE, page caches, overlay filesystems, and remote storage
Extend the sandboxed runtime for new GPUs, drivers, profiling tools, and device capabilities across NVIDIA and AMD hardware
Debug failures involving system calls, virtual memory, process lifecycle, kernel behavior, GPU drivers, and container isolation
Safely roll out runtime and kernel changes across a heterogeneous fleet using compatibility controls, scheduling constraints, feature flags, and observability
Work across runtime, scheduler, storage, and GPU infrastructure, taking ambiguous production problems from investigation through deployment

Requirements

What you’ll need

Strong Linux systems knowledge, particularly processes, virtual memory, filesystems, system calls, scheduling, namespaces, cgroups, and signals
Experience building or debugging container runtimes, sandboxes, Linux kernel, or similarly low-level infrastructure
Strong programming ability in Rust, Go, or another systems language, with an interest in becoming productive in both Rust and Go
Experience profiling and improving systems where memory movement, I/O, synchronization, or kernel interactions dominate performance
Comfort debugging across abstraction boundaries, from application behavior down through runtimes, drivers, and the kernel
Ability to turn loosely defined production problems into well-designed, reliable systems
Desire to own important infrastructure and work closely with internal teams and customers
Prior gVisor or machine-learning experience is not required
Helpful but not required: gVisor, runsc, runc, OCI runtimes, seccomp, checkpoint/restore systems, Linux kernel development, virtualization, sandboxing, kernel modules, device proxying, CUDA, ROCm, GPU drivers, accelerator virtualization, GPU profiling, RDMA, high-performance networking, FUSE, EROFS, direct I/O, mmap, page-cache behavior, storage engines, large-memory or multi-GPU inference and training systems, and open-source systems software contributions

Benefits

Comp & perks

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