Senior Protocol Engineer

Our client, a pioneering company in the blockchain and distributed ledger technology space, is seeking a highly skilled Senior Protocol Blockchain Engineer to join their innovative team. With a mission to revolutionize open finance and create fair, efficient, and accessible financial systems, they are building a cutting-edge platform using advanced distributed ledger technology to address real-world challenges. This is an exciting opportunity to work with groundbreaking technology and impact the future of financial systems.

Our client is at the forefront of blockchain innovation, developing a revolutionary platform based on a novel consensus algorithm that delivers unprecedented performance and security. Key highlights include:

• Exceptional Scalability: Ability to handle high transaction volumes while maintaining robustness against faults.
• User Experience Focus: A product-driven organization where passionate engineering and delivery teams collaborate in autonomous product groups to unlock the full potential of their technology.
• Mission-Driven: Committed to driving fairness and innovation in financial systems.

If you are eager to contribute to a mission that promotes fairness and innovation, this is the place to make a difference.

The Senior Protocol Blockchain Engineer will:

• Lead Development: Spearhead the creation of features and small-scale projects, managing the process from technical design to launch, while gathering metrics and iterating based on feedback.
• Architect Solutions: Design and develop components or subsystems, ensuring scalability and optimal performance.
• Stakeholder Communication: Engage effectively with stakeholders, making and documenting critical technical decisions.
• Mentorship: Guide and mentor junior engineers, set technical direction for features, and provide coaching to team members.
• Strategic Contribution: Play a key role in shaping the team’s technical strategy, lead smaller technical initiatives, and align work with broader organizational goals.
• Testing & Pipeline Leadership: Drive the development of testing frameworks and pipelines, establish feedback loops, and manage incident responses.
• Engineering Excellence: Uphold and promote high standards in company-wide engineering practices and culture.

The ideal candidate will bring:

• Experience: Over 8 years of hands-on experience in software or technology roles, with a deep focus on distributed systems or high-performance backend infrastructure.
• Blockchain Expertise: At least 3 years of experience in architecting and implementing multiple features of a core blockchain protocol, emphasizing high scale, performance, and reliability.
• Theoretical Knowledge: A robust understanding of distributed systems and Web3 concepts, both theoretically and practically.
• Decision-Making: Proven ability to drive technical decisions and solutions across research, security, and product domains.
• Quality Passion: A strong commitment to maintaining high-quality standards in protocol engineering and security.

The role requires:

• Code Quality: A demonstrated history of writing clean, efficient, testable, and maintainable code for concurrent distributed systems.
• Layer 1 Expertise: In-depth knowledge of Layer 1 architecture, including transaction lifecycle, block synchronization, and state transition logic.
• EVM Proficiency: Comprehensive understanding of Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) internals and experience integrating runtime environments into core protocols.
• Networking Skills: Proficiency in designing and optimizing P2P networking stacks and implementing efficient RPC/gRPC interfaces for node communication.
• Testing Experience: Strong background in developing robust protocol-level unit and integration tests.
• Cloud & DevOps: Familiarity with cloud-native technologies (preferably GCP or AWS) and DevOps practices including Git/GitHub, GitHub Actions, Docker/Kubernetes, Terraform, and monitoring tools like Grafana/Prometheus.
• Security Awareness: A thorough understanding of secure coding practices and adherence to community standards such as OWASP guidelines.

Additional skills that would be advantageous include:

• Go Expertise: Familiarity with Go concurrency primitives (go-routines, channels) and advanced Go tooling for profiling, benchmarking, and debugging.
• Emerging Technologies: Experience with cutting-edge blockchain technologies such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), multi-party computation (MPC), or advanced Account Abstraction (ERC-4337).
• AI Integration: Interest or experience in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI to enhance application development.
• Open-Source Contributions: Experience contributing to or auditing open-source blockchain clients (e.g., Go-Ethereum).
• Cross-Chain Knowledge: Familiarity with cross-chain communication protocols and state synchronization methods.