Protocol Engineer
About the Role
You will design, implement, and operate core protocol software focusing on reliability, performance, and identity-specific features. You will work on client/runtime components, networking, cross-chain identity flows, and zero-knowledge integrations. You will run and operate testnets, ship upgrades and rollouts, build observability and tooling, respond to incidents, and expand test coverage.
Requirements
- Strong systems engineering in Go or Rust with concurrency async profiling and performance tuning
- Experience building backend or protocol-adjacent infrastructure that runs in production
- Familiarity with blockchain client internals such as EVM WASM runtimes Cosmos SDK Substrate modules or rollup nodes
- Experience with RPCs JSON-RPC and gRPC node configuration validator and sequencer operations snapshots and state sync
- Sound engineering practices including testing code reviews CI/CD reproducible builds and documentation
- Security mindset including input validation DoS and eclipse awareness rate-limiting and key management basics
- Zero-knowledge proof integration experience (e.g., PLONK Groth16 FRI) — nice to have
- Experience with identity and credential standards such as VCs and VPs and replay protection models
- Cross-chain experience with light clients optimistic or validity bridges IBC XCM or L1↔L2 messaging
- Database and storage tuning experience for high-throughput chains and archive modes
- Contributions to open-source blockchain clients or identity and zk tooling
Responsibilities
- Build node and client components for execution runtime mempool sync and networking
- Implement identity primitives such as credential issuance and verification hooks
- Optimize state I/O snapshots pruning and fast/warp sync to improve throughput and p95 latency
- Integrate in-protocol zero-knowledge proof verification and support zkTLS ingestion
- Contribute to identity oracle message formats replay protection and finality handling
- Implement or integrate light-client and optimistic verification paths and cross-chain messaging
- Design relayer and operator tooling with clear incentives and observability
- Integrate decentralized data storage for privacy-preserved credentials
- Tune RocksDB LevelDB or equivalent and state commitment schemes for high throughput
- Stand up and operate public and private testnets plan releases and execute canary rollouts
- Add metrics logs and traces build dashboards and alerts and respond to incidents with postmortems
- Expand test coverage with unit integration fuzzing and differential tests across client versions
Benefits
- Medical allowance
- Life allowance
- Transportation allowance
- Incentives in the Web3 space