At Phygtl, we are solving the problem for Students suffering from social isolation, a challenge that affects over 60% of today's students, contributing significantly to rising depression and anxiety rates. We develop technology that reduces isolation by up to 40%, by providing a novel way to foster community on campus while bridging connections between physical and digital environments. Our team includes PhDs from institutions such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, alongside professionals from companies like Niantic, Meta, Magic Leap, Riot Games, Ubisoft, and Zynga. Led by a Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur, our startup is united by a commitment to rescue next-gen from Social Atrophy.
Founding Engineer — Distributed Systems (Games + AI)
Location
United States
Posted
87 days ago
Salary
0
Seniority
Mid Level
No structured requirement data.
Job Description
Founding Engineer — Distributed Systems (Games + AI)
Phygtl, Inc.
The Problem Young people are more connected online than ever, yet lonelier than any generation before them. Most digital platforms are optimized for passive consumption on screens, pulling people away from the environments they live in. We are exploring the opposite: technology that brings people together in real-world environments. To do that, software must understand place, context, and coordinated action, not just users and clicks. What We Are Building Vyry is infrastructure that allows physical places to accumulate persistent digital meaning through human participation. When students coordinate in quests, they are not simply completing activities. They are creating artifacts, relationships, and identity traces that remain anchored to real locations. Over time, campuses begin to develop a persistent experiential layer, where places contain memories, co-created assets, and discovery paths generated by the community itself. The experiences themselves are not the product. They are the behavioral interface through which the system learns how humans coordinate and co-create meaning in physical environments. Phygtl is building a system where: - physical environments become stateful systems - human coordination generates persistent artifacts - places accumulate structured memory and identity - distributed services maintain the world state of these environments Recent proofs: - 12k → 175k students reached in 2025 - 25% of MAUs complete quests - pilots show up to 40% reduction in social isolation The team combines consumer product, spatial, and game-world expertise, with seasones talents from: Roblox • Niantic • Ubisoft alongside a research layer that includes: 2 professors • 4 PhDs Future Direction Today Vyry operates as a mobile app. The next phase evolves the system into infrastructure for smart glasees. The long-term architecture enables developers and brands to create context-aware activities inside the spatial environment, similar to how platforms like Roblox enabled creators to build experiences on top of a shared world layer. This requires building distributed systems capable of coordinating environments, users, AI agents, and third-party developers simultaneously. What You Would Work On 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. Hard Problems We’re Exploring - Persistent shared world state - artifacts, identities, and quests evolving across sessions and users - Massively concurrent spatial coordination - enabling real-time participation across many users interacting in the same environments - Distributed AI orchestration - production systems where multiple AI agents operate in parallel while maintaining reliability and latency guarantees - Platform infrastructure - evolving the system from a single product into infrastructure other developers can build on Role We are looking for a hands-on distributed systems engineer from the gaming industry who wants to become a founding engineer. You would: - 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 We are not looking for someone to simply build backend services, but a talent who wants to architect the distributed systems layer of a new spatial computing platform. Compensation 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 - Full-time This role is designed for someone who wants to be a founding engineer at a startup without having to start one from scratch. Who This Is For Engineers who: - have deep experience building distributed systems - have worked on real-time or game-scale infrastructure - think in systems architecture rather than isolated services - are comfortable designing for concurrency, reliability, and scale - have 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 - are already experimenting with AI-native development workflows 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 Please do not apply if: - you are looking for a salaried job today - you want a freelance contract or short-term gig - you are bridging time until your next role - you are primarily a traditional CRUD backend developer This is a founding role with startup emotions. 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
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