Company Description

Birdai Labs, Inc. is building a new frontier in market infrastructure—redefining how value is discovered, priced, and distributed in real time.

We believe the systems that move value should distribute it fairly. Our mission is to bring structure, transparency, and efficiency to systems where value is currently fragmented, opaque, and unevenly captured.

We are defining a new category for MEV distribution that merges economic efficiency with emerging regulatory frameworks. This requires rethinking how systems are designed at the lowest levels of execution.

Based in New York, NY and San Francisco, CA, Birdai operates at the intersection of distributed systems, market structure, and applied cryptography. We are a small, high-leverage team focused on building systems that directly impact real economic flows.

Role Description

We are hiring a Founding Engineer to design and build the core system from first principles.

This is not a role for implementing predefined features. You will be responsible for turning ambiguous problems into working systems—defining architecture, making tradeoffs, and shipping production-grade infrastructure in a fast-moving environment.

You will work across the full stack of a real-time distributed system:

data ingestion and state reconstruction
low-latency execution pathways
auction and coordination mechanisms
system reliability and failure handling

You will make critical technical decisions that shape both the product and the company. The systems you build will directly mediate real economic flows. As an early engineer, you will also define engineering standards, influence hiring, and set the cultural bar for how systems are built.

Responsibilities

Design and implement core system architecture for a real-time distributed platform
Own systems end-to-end: from concept → design → implementation → production
Translate ambiguous, high-level problems into concrete technical solutions
Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, latency constraints, and system failures
Drive technical direction across components, not just within a single service
Collaborate closely with product and business to align technical decisions with economic outcomes
Establish engineering best practices, code quality standards, and system reliability expectations

Qualifications

Experience leveraging AI tools and agent-based workflows to accelerate development
Strong systems programming experience (Rust, C/C++, or similar)
Deep experience building or operating distributed systems with real-world constraints (latency, scale, fault tolerance)
Proven ability to design systems, not just implement them
Demonstrated ownership of complex systems or products from end-to-end
Strong intuition for tradeoffs across performance, complexity, and reliability
Comfortable operating in ambiguous environments with minimal structure

Strong signals (not required, but highly valued):

Experience with blockchain consensus internals, validator client architecture, or low-level protocol development
Experience with virtual machines or low-level execution environments
Background in systems where correctness and latency both matter

Founding Engineer - Staff Distributed Systems

Benefits