Blockchain Distributed System Engineer

Birdai Labs, Inc; United States; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full health, dental, and vision benefits

Meaningful early-stage equity grant

Job summary

Birdai Labs, Inc in the New York Metro area is seeking a Lead Distributed Systems Engineer to lead the validator client and auction service for a MEV redistribution system on Sui. This role requires a PhD or equivalent experience in distributed systems and proficiency in Rust.

The position offers a competitive salary of $200,000–$300,000, equity, and full health benefits, with hybrid work expected once the team is co-located.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent depth in distributed systems, consensus, or applied cryptography.
• Production Rust experience, or depth in another systems language.
• Working understanding of BFT consensus and its failure modes.

Responsibilities

• Lead the validator client and auction service software.
• Ensure validator client correctness and failure-mode analysis.
• Direct technical interface with the Sui Foundation.

Skills

Production Rust experience

BFT consensus understanding

Adversarial systems reasoning

Test-first orientation

Education

PhD or equivalent in distributed systems

Job description

Lead Distributed Systems Engineer — Validator & MEV

Birdai Labs · New York Metro (US-based, NYC area strongly preferred) · Full-time

About Birdai

Birdai is building a protocol-layer MEV redistribution system on Sui, with Solana expansion ahead. We're a pre‑mainnet, seed‑stage team backed by Castle Island Ventures. Our edge is mechanism design: we redistribute MEV at the protocol layer rather than relying on social contracts or hardware attestation. The team brings senior quantitative trading (Citadel) and traditional asset management (Franklin Templeton) backgrounds to a problem that has been treated as a middleware afterthought.

The role

You will lead the validator client and the auction service that sits at its core — the software that detects MEV opportunities, runs the auction, and routes the redistribution. This is the highest‑leverage engineering seat on the team and the one where correctness matters most: a defect here is a protocol failure, not a bug.

You will not be writing code from scratch alone. Our CTO built the full Sui stack solo in three months using agents extensively. You will work the same way — orchestrating agent output, owning the system mental model, and adversarially reviewing what the agents produce. We are hiring engineers to own subsystems and catch the failures that agents miss, not to be code generators.

What you'll own

• Validator client correctness across BFT integration points, fee‑split invariants, and adversarial ordering cases.
• The on‑chain and off‑chain components of the auction service, including bundle validation and the deterministic redistribution split.
• Failure‑mode analysis: where the protocol breaks under coordinated validator defection, searcher collusion, or consensus‑layer attacks — and the test infrastructure to catch those cases before mainnet.
• Direct technical interface with the Sui Foundation on consensus‑layer interactions as our protocol matures.

What we're looking for

• PhD or equivalent depth in distributed systems, consensus, or applied cryptography — or a track record that demonstrates the same.
• Production Rust experience, or equivalent depth in another systems language with willingness to operate in Rust from day one.
• Working understanding of BFT consensus (Mysticeti, Narwhal‑Bullshark, Tower BFT, or similar) and the failure modes that come with it.
• Demonstrated ability to reason about adversarial systems — MEV, validator economics, market microstructure, or comparable domains where the threat model is other rational actors, not random noise.
• A test‑first orientation and the discipline to scope invariants before writing or prompting code.
• Calibrated skepticism toward AI‑generated code. We want engineers who have been burned by an agent producing plausible‑but‑wrong output and built habits around catching it.

Nice to have, not required

• Prior validator, sequencer, or block‑builder work on any chain.
• MEV searcher, builder, or relay experience.
• Background in HFT, market‑making, or quantitative trading execution systems.
• Familiarity with Move or experience integrating with non‑EVM execution layers.

Compensation and structure

• Base salary: $200,000–$300,000, calibrated to depth and prior ownership.
• Equity: Meaningful early‑stage grant.
• Benefits: Full health, dental, and vision.
• Location: US‑based, NYC metro strongly preferred. Hybrid expected once the team is co‑located; remote considered for an exceptional fit.