Backend Engineering Manager, Cloud Inference

About Modular

About the role:

What you will do:

• Lead and grow a team of backend engineers building cloud inference services running on Kubernetes (control plane + data plane services).
• Drive execution across projects with clear scope, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Own operational excellence: on-call readiness, incident response, root-cause analysis, and prevention (SLOs, alerts, runbooks).
• Partner with stakeholders (product, infrastructure, security, and adjacent engineering orgs) to align priorities, manage tradeoffs, and communicate progress.
• Establish engineering best practices for design reviews, code quality, testing, safe rollouts, and post-incident learning.
• Improve system performance and efficiency by guiding teams to use metrics, profiling, load tests, and capacity models (TTFT/TPOT/TPM, utilization, saturation).
• Build a culture of ownership, clarity, and continuous improvement, helping engineers do their best work and grow in impact.

What you bring to the table:

•  10+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems, with 3+ years of engineering management experience (or demonstrated team leadership at scale).
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals (reliability, scalability, consistency, failure modes) and comfort working on performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience operating services on Kubernetes in a cloud environment (deployments, networking, scaling, service mesh or equivalent patterns).
• Experience running on-call rotations and leading incident response with high standards for follow-through.
• Ability to translate ambiguous goals into execution plans, and to communicate clearly with engineers and non-engineering stakeholders.
• A pragmatic approach to building durable systems: security, privacy, and compliance are part of the definition of done.

What Modular brings to the table:

• Amazing Team. We are a progressive and agile team with some of the industry’s best engineering and product leaders.
• World-class Benefits. In order to attract the best, we need to offer the best. Premier insurance plans, up to 5% 401k matching, flexible paid time off, and more are available to you! Please note that specific benefit packages may vary based on your location.
• Competitive Compensation. We offer very strong compensation packages, including stock options. We want people to be focused on their best work and believe in tailoring compensation plans to meet the needs of our workforce. 
• Team Building Events. We organize regular team onsites and local meetups in Los Altos, CA as well as different cities. Traveling 2-4 times a year is expected for all roles.