About the job
Modal has always obsessed over developer experience and productivity. With rapid advancements in the capabilities of AI coding agents, the practice of developing software and the meaning of developer experience is changing. We see this as an opportunity. We’re looking for an experienced researcher to join us and help make it even easier and more productive to build on Modal. We believe that our code-first approach to AI infrastructure is uniquely well suited to agent-based development. But we’re looking to do even better by subjecting agent productivity to rigorous evaluation and using those insights to guide the development of our platform.
Responsibilities
You’ll work in collaboration with Modal’s SDK team and other product engineers to build out a framework and process for agent productivity evaluation. Our goal is to treat developer experience optimization as a scientific problem. You’ll be responsible for defining quantitative objectives, designing systems to measure performance, and translating results into product improvements. You’ll also be expected to stay on top of new developments in tools and workflows and to work with our customers to understand how they’re using coding agents with Modal and where we can be providing more value.
Qualifications
Minimum
- Sufficient technical skills to design and implement scalable agent benchmarking workflows
- Experience with experimental design, measurement, and statistical evaluation
- Up-to-date knowledge of the latest advances in coding agents (with a dose of healthy skepticism about their current capabilities)
- Interest in developer tooling and opinions about developer ergonomics
- Familiarity with the use cases that Modal serves (generative AI inference, large-scale batch jobs, multi-node training, etc.)
- Strong communication skills and the ability to convey research insights to decision makers
Preferred
No preferred qualifications listed.