Protocol Security Researcher — AI-Driven DeFi Risk

Aave; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs seeks a Protocol Security Researcher to strengthen its internal protocol security function in London. You will work at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review to assess major changes before deployment.

You will maintain security context across deployed systems, reason about risks from dependencies and integrations, and collaborate with external auditors to define scope and concerns.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant security experience.
• Strong smart contract security background.
• Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes.
• Attacker mindset: identify how it could be exploited.
• Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms (lending, liquidations, oracles, governance).
• Evidence of using AI to improve security research, review quality, or throughput.
• Clear written communication: explain risk, impact, uncertainty, trade-offs to engineers and non-security stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Review major Aave protocol changes before external audit or deployment.
• Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, and integrations.
• Participate in design and architecture discussions to influence security decisions.
• Identify risks in Aave-adjacent systems, including assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, dependencies.
• Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and evaluate its effectiveness in review workflows.
• Turn findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, and testing or monitoring ideas.
• Collaborate with monitoring and incident response teams on detection/response needs.
• Work with external auditors to define scope, known risks, and areas of concern.

Skills

Smart contract security

Attacker mindset

Code review

AI-assisted security

Security communication

Tools

Fuzzing

Job description

Aave Labs seeks a Protocol Security Researcher to strengthen its internal protocol security function in London. You will work at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review to assess major changes before deployment.

You will maintain security context across deployed systems, reason about risks from dependencies and integrations, and collaborate with external auditors to define scope and concerns.