Shared chapter
Vladislav Kopman
Software Engineer at Bird · Full-stack product engineer
Relationship
How we worked together
Vlad is one of the best and most prolific engineers at Bird. His name appears throughout an extraordinary number of the company's repositories. Chan Nguyen introduced us while Bird was still in the Santa Monica WeWork; I interviewed Vlad, gave him a mapping assignment, and strongly supported hiring him. I was already confident he would excel, and eight years later he is still building at Bird.
Influence
What I learned
Vlad and the rest of Bird's engineering team were a major reason I stayed for eight years. We shared an enormous passion for what we were building and a habit of staying late after the office emptied, turning complicated operational problems into concrete tasks and durable systems. He is now bringing the power of AI into Bird's platform.
Projects
Projects we built together
Bird · 2018 – 2025
My story at Bird
Vlad and I formed Bird's original core backend team. We worked together across charger tools, an early multilayer map-management system for scooters, chargers, nests, and field operations, the RBAC authorization system that remains foundational to Bird's administration tools, agreement management, and many other operational platforms. Our pattern was consistent: take a sprawling problem, break it into manageable pieces, and build the system Bird needed to operate.
Read the case studyBird · 2018 – 2025
Habitat — Bird’s geospatial operating system
Vlad and I worked together on Habitat as part of Bird's core backend platform. His breadth across the company's systems and ability to turn complex operational requirements into production software helped Habitat integrate with the wider infrastructure it governed.
Read the case studyBird · 2020 Hackathon
Birdy AI — a conversational operating system before LLMs
Vlad was part of the team behind Birdy during Bird's 2020 remote hackathon. His deep familiarity with Bird's backend and operational systems helped the conversational platform reach across the many tools and capabilities employees needed.
Read the case studyThemes
The work we shared
Elsewhere