VP, Protocol / Backend Engineer

## About the role Who You Are: - You are an experienced Protocol, DevOps or SRE Engineer with; - Prior software engineering or application development experience in modern programming language (.Net, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, etc.) - Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure or strong knowledge of the blockchain domain (proof-of-stake consensus, web3, RPC, etc) particularly Solana or ETH. - Deep Observability Know-how: metrics, tracing, block/slot analytics, alerting, incident debugging, and performance dashboards along with research aptitude and a desire to never repeat the same problem twice. - Performance engineering experience: profiling, lock contention, cache behavior, async networking, kernel/network tuning, benchmarking, and p99 latency reduction. - Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and virtualization technologies (VMWare, KVM, Docker or similar). - A security mindset: awareness of adversarial transaction flows, spam/DoS resistance, economic exploits, key management, and safe handling of privileged validator infrastructure. - Strong written and verbal communication skills with an ability to distill information to both technical and non-technical audiences. ## What You'll Do - Engineer resilient distributed services related to our blockchain participation offerings that handle high-throughput transaction flow, backpressure, retries, failures, and real-time coordination. - Dive into Rust + systems programming: engaging in low-latency, memory-safe backend work and build comfort in reading/modifying Solana validator-adjacent code. - Integrate with validator or node pipelines and reason about consensus, block production, transaction propagation, execution limits, and fee markets. - Identify & implement solutions for your domain where process, automation or tooling can significantly improve our ability to operate our systems. - Develop a present and forward looking view into what's happening in each part of your domain and how it applies to the business. Establish and communicate views that inform leadership and organizational strategy. - Continuously research and stay up-to-date with emerging trends in the Web3/Blockchain space. - Identify, scope and build on new product opportunities that may bring value to the business - Debug complex distributed blockchains and protocols to improve our participation. - Participate in and make improvements to, domain specific on-call rotations to ensure the continued reliability and uptime of our services. ## What We're Looking For - Prior software engineering or application development experience in modern programming language (.Net, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, etc.) - Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure or strong knowledge of the blockchain domain (proof-of-stake consensus, web3, rpc, etc) - Strong concepts of custody key management, generation, HSMs and MPC technologies. - Experience or awareness in working with Chainlink systems, services or ecosystem. - Ability to script in a high-level scripting language like Python, Perl or bash coupled with an ability to identify human processes that can be scripted and automated. - Deep familiarity with compute-infrastructure systems, tooling, observability, debugging strategies along with research aptitude and a desire to never repeat the same problem twice. - Troubleshooting expertise of complex application flows which span multiple systems along with an ability to identify server, network, and application issues and apply measurable remediations. - Working knowledge of Linux systems, system performance optimization and command line tooling. - Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and virtualization technologies (VMWare, KVM, Docker or similar). - Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, LogDNA, etc.) - Conceptual knowledge of security best practices, including encryption, access control, and network security (firewalls, traffic filtering). - Strong written and verbal communication skills with an ability to distill information to both technical and non-technical audiences. - Strong problem solving skills and ability to identify problems, determine their root cause, and see them through to solution. ## Nice to have - At-least 5 years of software engineering experience. - Experience with Kubernetes, or similar compute orchestration systems and a familiarity with container orchestration. - Skill in defining infrastructure as code with Terraform or other infrastructure orchestration tooling. - MEV knowledge: searchers, bundles, auctions, tips, sandwich/arbitrage/liquidation patterns, and tradeoffs around fairness and censorship resistance. - Jito ecosystem familiarity: Jito-Solana, Block Engine, relayers, bundle simulation, tip accounts, validator integration. - Distributed systems: consensus-adjacent systems, gossip/propagation, fault tolerance, retries, backpressure, and high-throughput service design. ## What We Offer - Competitive base salary and discretionary bonus - Competitive paid time off - Company-paid health and protective benefits for employees and their eligible dependents - Free virtual coaching sessions through Headspace - Free daily snacks in-office - Opportunities to learn about the Crypto industry - Smart, entrepreneurial, and fun colleagues *Benefits may vary depending on location.