[Hiring] Founding Engineer @Phygtl

Role Description

We are looking for a hands-on distributed systems engineer from the gaming industry who wants to become a founding engineer. You would help design and build the distributed systems layer that powers the platform. This includes:

• Real-time coordination systems for large numbers of concurrent users
• Distributed world state for artifacts, quests, identities, and spatial context
• APIs and infrastructure enabling developer and brand participation
• Orchestration of multiple AI agents operating within the system
• Scalable service architecture for persistent spatial environments
• AI platform infrastructure such as vector search, retrieval systems, and agent orchestration that power contextual reasoning inside the system
• Search and discovery infrastructure allowing users and developers to navigate artifacts, identities, and environments across the network

This role sits between game infrastructure, distributed systems, and AI platform architecture.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building distributed systems
• Experience working on real-time or game-scale infrastructure
• Comfortable designing for concurrency, reliability, and scale
• Experience building AI or ML platforms, such as:
• Vector search or retrieval systems
• RAG pipelines or LLM services
• Agent orchestration platforms
• AI safety or synthetic data pipelines
• Already experimenting with AI-native development workflows

Requirements

• Design distributed system architecture
• Define service boundaries and coordination mechanisms
• Build systems for concurrency, persistence, and scale
• Integrate AI-driven pipelines into production infrastructure
• Shape the platform architecture as the system evolves beyond the app

Benefits

• This is an equity-first founding role.
• Compensation is equity-only until our next funding round (target H2 2026).
• You can join either part-time while keeping your current role or full-time.

Who This Is For

This role is designed for someone who wants to be a founding engineer at a startup without having to start one from scratch. This often resonates with engineers who have spent years inside large companies and now want to build something category-defining with ownership.

Who This Is NOT For

• Those looking for a salaried job today
• Those wanting a freelance contract or short-term gig
• Those bridging time until their next role
• Those primarily a traditional CRUD backend developer

If Interested

Send:

• GitHub or portfolio
• Examples of distributed systems or infrastructure you built
• Anything you’ve built involving AI orchestration, agents, or platform systems