Been interviewing for ML Infra roles and have made to the final rounds everywhere. Will talk numbers next. Assuming both pay similar, what would you pick? Anyone working at Modular or know people who work there - how is the work and growth like? Blind tax - 270k Expected new TC - ~350k
IMO, most of these new AI companies will be dead in the next couple years. There is no way they can compete with the cloud giants/OpenAI, or even Anthropic. Don’t have the money for compute, and also do not have the raw brain power (army of Berkeley/Stanford/MIT PhD research scientists) Databricks at least has a very strong business and is the worlds fastest growing enterprise SaaS company at multi billion revenue scale. My answer would be the same if you replaced Databricks with Google/Meta/Microsoft
Modular is not one of those gimmicky AI companies nor does it focus on training models such as Anthropic/OpenAI. It focuses on AI infra (compiler & toolchain) which is a completely fragmented market at the moment and will only become more needed as more developers start deploying.
Modular is led by Chris Lattner who’s behind LLVM, OpenCL, Swift, MLIR, parts of Tensorflow, etc. Their leadership is filled with many talented folks who’ve contributed majorly to modern day systems for ML (or systems in general). They do have an army of PhDs from top schools as well to counter your point. Also, Modular is not an AI company. It’s systems for AI company. They’re giving out tools to AI companies to succeed instead of doing AI themselves (what Nvidia does but at a software level). I do believe that the company will succeed given the leadership’s pedigree of delivering a seemingly impossible task.
@OP, you won’t work with “geniuses” at dbx. Modular has a small focused team. Better go there if you want to learn a lot
How is the interview process at Modular?
DM for info.
Worked with Chris Lattner. He is technically exceptional but not a great person to work with so I would be wary of Modular culture. For example, I wanted to leave his team but he blocked my and others' transfers which I hadn't heard at Google before.
Thanks for sharing! That's very interesting.
If you join modular dont expect any payout for at least minimum 5 years. They need to go through multiple rounds of raising too.
You really expecting 350k at Modular? Base for Senior Staff caps at around 250k and the options I’ve seen have not been above 200k / 4 yr.
How can you put a price in the options in the above since they're (illiquid) options, not RSUs?
Strike price.
Modular is a complete sh*t-show, be careful going there. It's led by ex-google tensorflow team, who were in charge during the demise of tensorflow (and rise of pytorch). They made the critical decisions in TF that killed it in the industry, then they left and started Modular. Also, ask around about working with Tim Davis, dude is an aggressive douche masquerading as a dancing monkey on stage. You really want to be working with him? And Chris is undoubtedly a computing genius (Swift, LLVM, TPUs, MLIR, etc), but look into his technical misteps/failures also, like some of the work he did at Apple and see if you want to take this new "bet".
I get that vibe off Tim Davis. I'm not sure Chris is a "computing genius", more just got lucky with llvm. The other projects you mention are 'eh', their contributions are arguable.
200K stock for 4 years. That too low. Shouldn’t it be much more ? I mean you are taking risk going here from Amazon
That’s like 50K equity/ year. If I assume 200K RSU / year at Amazon modular stock will need to 4X to match Amazon RSU target
Heard a lot of negative comments about Databricks on here.