Why this role exists
Modal raised $750M Unknown on 15 Oct 2026Unverified.
ABOUT US: AI NEEDS A NEW INFRASTRUCTURE LAYER. WE'RE BUILDING IT AT MODAL. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Ramp https://modal.com/blog/how-ramp-built-a-full-context-background-coding-agent-on-modal, Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We've passed $1B in annualized run rate, up 15x from a year ago. In October 2026 we raised a $750M Series D led by Accel at a $15.75B valuation. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g.,Seaborn https://github.com/mwaskom/seaborn,Luigi https://github.com/spotify/luigi), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. THE ROLE: We are looking for PhD research interns with strong research experience in reinforcement learning, machine learning, and foundation models, including large language and multimodal models, to join our research team. This internship is well suited to candidates interested in improving existing methods and developing new techniques for large-scale model training, optimization, and inference, extending models to long-context and long-horizon tasks, and improving inference-time efficiency, reliability, and robustness in high-stakes real-world deployments. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS: 1. Currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, machine learning, or a related field. 2. A demonstrated record of research in reinforcement learning, machine learning, foundation models, or related areas. 3. Experience developing and evaluating large-scale models or machine learning systems. 4. Familiarity with distributed training, large-scale inference, or multi-GPU environments. 5. Publications at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, CoRL, UAI, JMLR, or TMLR. 6. Strong programming and engineering skills, with the ability to translate research ideas into working implementations. 7. A collaborative, mission-driven mindset and the ability to work effectively across research and engineering teams.