hiring Director of AI @Sei_FND
timing has never been better. team is bought in.
problems we're tackling are unsolved - maybe unsolvable today. we're not waiting.
one person. founder access. move fast.
built before? can you ship quickly?
DMs open https://t.co/PVVxqwJKS6
recently learned that most other leading L1s have twice as many engineers as @Sei_Labs, yet ship at about the same rate. Sei Labs was born in the bear market and learned fast that lean well-run teams can accomplish just as much as larger ones.
Just spoke to a YC founder who told me that many of the teams in their cohort are spending more on AI credits than engineers.
The shift is well underway
block cut 4,000 people. jack dorsey called it an embrace of AI. the stock jumped 24%.
this isn't a one-off. i'm hearing it everywhere in talent circles: leaner headcount targets, higher bars per hire with AI fluency a baseline filter. the floor is moving.
for hiring teams: every hire in a leaner org is load-bearing. talent strategy is the highest leverage function in your company. the fastest learners compound impact.
for job-seekers: this isn't the market punishing you. it's the market repricing what "ready" looks like. AI-native isn't a bonus anymore — it's the minimum.
the good news? it's learnable fast. and you'll actually like it.
-ChatGPT / Claude — daily driver, not occasional tool
-Perplexity — replaces your google searches (big fan)
-Gemini — huge context window, great with Gsuite
-Notion AI — thinking, writing, synthesis
-Gamma — decks in minutes
-Make / Zapier — solve the repetitive stuff
-DeepLearning.ai — free, practical, no CS degree needed
-The Rundown AI — 5 min daily, no fluff
(this list isn't exhaustive, use AI to find what you need)
this isn't a doomer post, although let's be honest these shifts hurt, and being laid off is terrible. but there is light in this. keep building.
(yes, this post was made with the help of AI)
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
####
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack
Spoke with several YC founders planning to lay off all engineers below staff/principal — basically everyone under L5. This only became viable after Opus 4.5 in December.
The Block layoffs are a signal: the floor just collapsed.
If you’re early in your career, the next few years are everything. Your edge will be how well you integrate AI into the value you create. The fastest learners are about to compound at absurd rates.
🎤 We’re excited to welcome @KartikB101, Founding Engineer and AI Lead at @Sei_Labs, as a speaker at ETHDenver 2026.
Kartik leads AI efforts at Sei Labs, with prior research experience at CMU, NVIDIA, and DeepMind.
Kartik’s participation reminds us that in New BUIDL City, there’s somETHing for everyone to learn, create, and connect.
The US Treasury market is one of the largest and most liquid in the world.
Tokenization opens this institutional asset class to billions globally, no minimum investments, no intermediaries, instant settlement. @OndoFinance USDY is now live on Sei, the fastest L1 built for global markets.
Institutional grade assets need institutional grade infrastructure, and Sei is quickly becoming the global settlement layer for modern finance.
yesterday, the governance proposal for upgrading @SeiNetwork to v6.3 was passed.
this will be the very first fork on the road to Giga.
Giga is Sei Network’s high-performance future, with 200k tps and 400ms blocktimes.
below are the changelogs for v6.3, which include adding functionality for an EVM-only staking precompile. this version also resolves a lot of tech debt.
users won’t notice any changes in the network, and that’s intentional. (note: infra providers will need to upgrade as they normally do.)
v6.3 is a part of Sei’s broader transition to becoming an EVM-only chain.
upgrades in the coming months will complete that transition by removing hundreds of thousands of lines of code. to build Giga, we first need a sterile environment.
Ondo's tokenized U.S. Treasuries are live on Sei 🇺🇸
USDY by @OndoFinance is one of the most adopted tokenized Treasury products in the market, with over $1.2B in circulation.
Now you can use it on the fastest L1—for lending, collateral, savings, and more.
Sei Labs presents a major research breakthrough:
Every blockchain in history has made the tradeoff between low latency and censorship resistance.
By combining MCP and sharding, we're able to solve that tradeoff for the first time, ever.
speculation is the hook to get initial users
once you have initial users, you can start offering long term products for sustainable activity
case study is Robinhood
start off with options trading to get users, and then start routing users to retirement accounts + banking
Alignment across infrastructure, performance, and adoption.
The foundation for modern markets is in place.
One last look at 2025 on Sei.
Read the Sei Report ↓
The $5B+ order flow revenue game just got democratized.
What Wall Street keeps exclusive, Monaco will make available to ANY builder.
Introducing PitPass, the BuilderCode system that shares revenue with any app built on Monaco’s deep, institutional-grade trading network.