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 revolutionise open finance and create fair, efficient, and accessible financial systems for everyone, our client is building a cutting-edge platform that leverages advanced distributed ledger technology to solve real-world problems. This is an exciting opportunity to work with groundbreaking technology and make a meaningful impact on the future of financial relationships.

About Our Client

Our client is at the forefront of blockchain innovation, developing a revolutionary platform built on a novel consensus algorithm that achieves unprecedented performance and security. Their technology boasts exceptional scalability, with the ability to handle high transaction volumes while maintaining robustness against faults. Committed to creating captivating user experiences, they operate as a product-driven organisation where passionate engineering and delivery teams collaborate in autonomous product groups to unlock the full potential of their technology. If you are eager to contribute to a mission that drives fairness and innovation in financial systems, this is the place to make a difference.

Responsibilities

The Senior Protocol Blockchain Engineer will:

Lead Development: Spearhead the creation of features and small-scale projects, managing the process from technical design through 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 organisational 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.

Qualifications

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.

Key Technical Skills 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.

Desirable Skills 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 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. Why Join Our Client? This is a unique opportunity to be part of a visionary team that is pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology.

The Senior Protocol Blockchain Engineer will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of financial systems, working on cutting-edge solutions that promise to transform how transactions are conducted globally. If you are passionate about innovation, thrive in a collaborative environment, and are excited by the challenge of solving complex technical problems, this role offers the chance to make a lasting impact.