Button Labs

Building Agentic Finance Infrastructure to Empower Retail Traders

Button Labs is pioneering a transformative approach to finance by creating agentic finance infrastructure and prime brokerage services directly on Hyperliquid, a cutting-edge blockchain layer-1 protocol known for its ultra-low latency and high throughput. At its core, Button Labs seeks to democratize access to sophisticated financial tools traditionally reserved for institutional players—bringing the capital efficiency, market access, and execution quality of prime brokerage to discretionary retail traders. Situated at the nexus of blockchain technology, decentralized finance (DeFi), and traditional financial markets, Button Labs is crafting a seamless, on-chain experience that bridges these historically siloed domains.

The platform enables users to trade over 185 perpetual futures contracts spanning diverse asset classes, including cryptocurrencies, gold, equity indices like the S&P 500, high-profile tech stocks such as NVIDIA (NVDA), and major forex pairs like EUR/USD. Importantly, all trading activity is conducted entirely on-chain with settlements denominated in USDC, a widely trusted stablecoin, ensuring transparency and transactional finality without intermediaries. This native integration with Hyperliquid allows Button to leverage its blockchain’s remarkable 70-millisecond block times and handle massive data volumes—upwards of 100GB daily—to deliver a trading experience that is both rapid and reliable.

One of the key innovations Button brings to the market is its unified collateral system and portable margin framework. These mechanisms are designed to unlock the latent value of traditionally dormant assets, notably Bitcoin, by enabling users to deploy their holdings as productive capital without relinquishing self-custody or compromising censorship resistance. This balance of capital efficiency and control aligns with the ethos of true decentralization while addressing the liquidity and capital access gaps that have long constrained retail traders. As such, Button Labs does not merely build software; it constructs the foundational infrastructure that empowers individuals to reclaim agency in how they manage and leverage their financial assets.

A Culture of Shipping Real Impact

Button Labs was founded by three highly experienced technology leaders—Atif Khan, Soby, and Salman Ahmed—whose backgrounds span major technology firms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Uber, as well as trailblazing crypto projects like Rainbow, Xai, Ex Populus, and thirdweb. This unique blend of deep expertise in both traditional tech and blockchain startups manifests in a culture that prizes velocity, craftsmanship, and a relentless focus on delivering meaningful outcomes over superficial prototypes or theoretical designs.

The engineering team at Button thrives on tackling some of the most demanding technical challenges in the blockchain and finance space. Managing infrastructure capable of indexing and processing a blockchain that finalizes a new block every 70 milliseconds and generates approximately 100GB of daily data requires not only technical mastery but also architectural foresight to balance scalability, fault tolerance, and real-time responsiveness. This environment nurtures engineers who embrace complexity, value precision, and are motivated by solving hard problems that have tangible impact on end users.

Collaboration is deeply embedded in Button’s DNA. The team operates from an intimate, high-quality office in San Francisco, fostering close-knit interactions that accelerate feedback loops and knowledge sharing. This setting is ideal for builders who prefer direct communication and a hands-on approach to product development. The culture encourages ownership and autonomy, empowering team members to influence product direction and technical strategy significantly. At Button, the emphasis is on shipping real, production-grade features that move the needle—this is a workplace for those who want to see their work shape the future of decentralized finance in a meaningful way.

What You'll Actually Do

Joining Button Labs as an early engineer means becoming a critical architect and implementer of the core infrastructure underpinning one of the most advanced DeFi prime brokerages in existence. For backend engineers, the role involves designing and building highly performant systems that can sustain extreme throughput demands with ultra-low latency. This includes direct integration with the Hyperliquid Layer 1 blockchain, handling live data streams, transaction validation, and ensuring seamless interoperability between protocol layers.

You will be responsible for developing and maintaining both real-time and batch data pipelines that feed analytics, trading algorithms, and risk management engines. These pipelines must be robust, scalable, and capable of processing large volumes of data with minimal delay—an essential requirement when managing real-time collateral and liquidation processes that protect both the platform and its users from adverse market events.

Protocol engineers and quantitative developers collaborate closely within Button’s interdisciplinary teams. Together, you will implement and deploy sophisticated trading strategies in production environments, monitor their performance, and continuously refine risk models to maintain system integrity under volatile market conditions. Your work will often involve cutting-edge programming languages and technologies such as Go, Rust, and Python, applied within distributed and microservices architectures.

Furthermore, there is scope to explore advanced security and trust mechanisms like Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which offer hardware-based isolation to protect sensitive computations—a critical feature when dealing with high-value financial transactions on a public blockchain. The role demands a mindset geared toward deep technical problem solving, an ability to thrive under ambiguity, and a passion for building infrastructure that balances innovation with operational stability.

Compensation & Benefits

While exact salary ranges at Button Labs depend on specific roles and experience levels, publicly available information from a recent Web3 Founding Senior Protocol Engineer posting suggests compensation bands from approximately $84,000 to $150,000 annually. Given Button’s early-stage status combined with its strong founding team pedigree and backing by prominent investors such as Blockchain Capital and Coinbase Ventures, it is reasonable to expect a compensation structure that includes a competitive base salary complemented by meaningful equity participation.

Equity upside is a particularly compelling component, reflecting the company’s potential for growth and the opportunity for employees to share in the long-term value created by pioneering new frontiers in DeFi and agentic finance. The company’s San Francisco headquarters fosters an on-site working environment conducive to close collaboration and rapid iteration, which may be considered a benefit by those who prefer working in-person within a vibrant startup ecosystem.

Standard startup benefits—such as health insurance, flexible time off, and retirement plans—are likely offered, although these have not been specifically disclosed publicly. Candidates should interpret this as a typical early-stage startup scenario, where benefits may evolve as the company scales. Transparency and open communication about compensation and benefits are expected during the hiring process to ensure alignment of expectations.

The Interview Process

Button Labs maintains a rigorous and highly technical interview process reflective of its seed-stage status and elite team composition. Candidates can anticipate an initial screening session conducted by one of the founders, focusing on cultural fit, motivation, and foundational knowledge of blockchain and financial systems. Given the company’s compact size and mission-critical product, aligning on values and mission is as important as technical skill.

Subsequent rounds involve deep-dive technical interviews intended to assess expertise in system design, distributed architectures, and engineering for ultra-low latency environments. Candidates should prepare to discuss architecture choices, trade-offs in throughput versus consistency, and their approach to designing fault-tolerant systems capable of handling real-time financial data streams.

Practical assessments or case studies are likely, emphasizing experience with blockchain protocols, DeFi products, and high-frequency trading systems. Interviewers will probe for a candidate’s ability to solve complex problems under pressure and their familiarity with technologies such as Go, Rust, Python, and potentially Trusted Execution Environments. The process also evaluates candidates’ communication skills and how they collaborate on cross-functional teams—critical factors in a small, high-impact startup environment.

Overall, the interview is designed not just to gauge technical prowess, but to confirm a candidate’s readiness to thrive in a fast-paced, high-autonomy, and impact-focused setting where decisions and code directly influence the company’s trajectory and user success.

Why Join / Why Not

Why Join: Button Labs represents a rare opportunity to be at the forefront of a groundbreaking shift in how retail traders engage with financial markets. By dismantling traditional barriers and delivering institutional-grade prime brokerage services on a decentralized platform, the company is reshaping the contours of capital access and trading efficiency. Working here means collaborating with a seasoned founding team that combines deep experience in tech and blockchain, backed by top-tier investors who believe in the mission and potential for exponential growth.

Engineers and builders at Button will tackle genuinely hard and meaningful problems—ranging from handling enormous data throughput on a novel blockchain, to architecting systems that preserve self-custody and censorship resistance while unlocking capital efficiency. The work is intellectually stimulating, technically challenging, and impactful, offering a chance to build products that empower individual traders at scale and influence the broader DeFi ecosystem’s evolution.

Why Not: The role demands a high degree of commitment and resilience, particularly given Button’s early-stage nature and its on-site San Francisco location. Candidates who prioritize remote work or seek a more relaxed, structured corporate environment may find the startup’s pace and in-person expectations a mismatch. Additionally, the volatile and rapidly evolving crypto market introduces inherent risks and operational complexities that can be stressful or unpredictable.

Engineering at Button requires comfort with ambiguity, frequent iteration, and ownership of end-to-end problem solving without extensive process guardrails. The technical challenges involve building infrastructure for high-frequency, leveraged trading—domains that carry significant responsibility and risk, where errors can have outsized consequences. Prospective candidates should weigh these factors carefully against their personal work style and career aspirations to determine if Button Labs is the right environment to thrive and contribute.