Member of Technical Staff - Research, Inference

Most of the value of owning a model shows up at serving time. We’re building a platform that covers the whole life of an LLM (train it, deploy it, observe it), and inference is where teams feel the difference every day. We already run elastic inference, sandboxes, distributed volumes, and multi-node training, and we control the infrastructure underneath, so the serving stack is ours to shape rather than something we resell.

You will do hands-on inference research at Modal, working with the research lead to pick high-impact bets and owning them end to end. The bets that matter most are the ones that move cost per token and tail latency on the workloads our customers actually run.

• Own end-to-end inference research bets: speculative decoding, disaggregated prefill/decode, quantization (FP8, INT4), KV-cache and memory management, autoscaling for spiky serverless traffic, and whatever else the research agenda calls for