The Role:We need someone to own and grow our presence in academia and research. That means running our Modal for Academics program: sponsoring courses and labs with compute credits, building relationships with professors and researchers at top institutions, and making Modal the default choice when someone needs GPUs for their next paper.
The right person has lived in this world. You know how grant cycles work, how labs are structured, and how the conference publishing process actually runs. You've also shown you can operate beyond the lab, whether that's organizing events, building community, or working across institutional boundaries.
In this role, you will:- Own and operate the Modal for Academics program end-to-end: handling inbound inquiries, overseeing grant decisions, onboarding, and follow-through.
- Identify and pursue sponsorship opportunities with university courses, ML research labs, and academic conferences, with a bias toward work that's likely to be widely read and cited.
- Build relationships with professors and researchers at top universities.
- Partner with leading AI research labs on compute grants and collaborative programs.
- Track outcomes: which grants produced papers, citations, talks, or downstream Modal adoption.
- Represent Modal at academic conferences (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and others) and research-adjacent events.
- Develop outreach templates, program documentation, and supporting content to scale inbound interest.
Requirements:- A PhD or research Master's from a strong program in ML/CS or with a large computational component. You know how grants work, how labs are structured, and how the conference process actually runs.
- Evidence that you've operated beyond pure research: organizing a workshop, running a student group, working with a grants office, industry internships, or similar.
- Strong written and verbal communication, including on technical matters. You'll be representing Modal to professors and researchers at top universities.
- Good judgment about what's worth pursuing. Not every course sponsorship or lab partnership is equal.
- Organized and self-directed. This role spans dozens of active relationships at any given time.
- Comfortable working in-person in a fast-paced startup environment.
Nice to have:- Experience as a conference organizer, area chair, workshop chair, or reviewer at a major ML conference.
- Existing relationships with professors and researchers at top universities.
