Senior Distributed Systems Engineer

Monad Labs is a venture-backed tech startup building the Monad blockchain, a high-performance smart contract platform built to bring world adoption to decentralized apps. Monad combines unparalleled performance (10,000 transactions per second) with portability (full compatibility for Ethereum smart contracts), leveraging innovations in parallel execution and distributed consensus.

Founded byJump Trading alums, our team solves challenging problems in distributed systems engineering and low-latency optimization, authoring novel open source code to implement a new, high-performance, high-reliability, high-value system.

After recently raising a $19 million seed round backed by Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Naval Ravikant, and other leaders in the crypto space, we are hiring a few more exceptional engineers who want to work on challenging problems with massive impact in a fast-paced environment.

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer to design and implement improvements to Monad’s BFT consensus mechanism, mempool, and p2p networking layer.

Who you are

• Resourceful and self-motivated
• Team oriented, collaborative, and a good communicator
• Adaptive; able to make meaningful contributions in a fast-paced environment
• Opinionated about software architecture
• Motivated to push the limits of system performance through repeated optimization
• Interested in building high-value fault-tolerant distributed systems

Requirements:

• You have practical experience with BFT consensus mechanisms
• You have practical experience with gossip protocols
• You have experience with distributed databases or state machines
• You understand consensus protocols like paxos and raft
• You understand concepts like vector clocks, synchronous vs asynchronous networks
• You understand network protocols (TCP/UDP)
• You have experience with distributed tracing and debugging in distributed environments
• You have experience in programming with a statically-typed language (eg. C++/Rust/Go)

Bonus:

• Contributions to open source projects
• Startup experience
• Experience working in crypto

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and optimizing improvements to Monad’s Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism and p2p networking layer
• Researching state-of-the-art BFT algorithms
• Improving and optimizing performance of the consensus mechanism
• Developing tests to prove the reliability and correctness of the consensus mechanism

Why work with us

Working at Monad Labs means doing challenging work on a high-impact problem with exceptional teammates.

Here are some of the people you’ll work with:

• James, performance engineering expert and system architect; previously designed and built ultra-low-latency systems for a top high-frequency trading team at Jump Trading;
• Ariq, expert at low-level firmware and software programming; previously a senior engineer at Arista Networks, where he served as lead maintainer on multiple linux kernel networking drivers for Arista EOS devices;
• Aashish, expert systems designer and hacker, previously the first engineer at Pattern Research, a leading crypto HFT firm, where he designed and built the entire trading stack from scratch; graduated from MIT at age 19

We think you’ll enjoy working with us, and that you’ll find the work to be extremely impactful and challenging.

Salary and benefits

Minimum full-time salary of $200,000+. (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary; a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.)