Founding Protocol Engineer

Consider, Inc.; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Rift seeks a Founding Protocol Engineer to design and build the protocol, infrastructure, and reliability at scale. You will work directly with the CTO and CEO on multichain smart contract primitives, shaping the future of a lean startup.

The role offers substantial autonomy to drive crypto's next unicorn, with exposure to high-impact decisions and close collaboration with leadership. You will operate across chains and evolve the protocol as the ecosystem expands.

Qualifications

• Write high-performance Rust code for protocol components.
• Interact with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana at protocol level (running nodes, indexing data).
• Understand DeFi protocols at smart contract level and assess risks.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the protocol, infrastructure, and reliability at Rift.
• Collaborate with CTO/CEO on multichain smart contract primitives.
• Drive architecture decisions with significant autonomy in a lean team.

Skills

Rust

Blockchain protocol

DeFi concepts

AI tooling

Crypto self-custody

Node operation

Education

High school or college dropout

Job description

As our Founding Protocol Engineer, you will design and build out our protocol, infrastructure, and manage system reliability at Rift.

We're looking for someone who's hungry to contribute at every level of protocol development: from building out the core exchange logic that will process billions of dollars of trades, to ensuring high availability and performance for the protocol and API. You will work directly with the CTO and CEO on designing the multichain smart contract primitives the protocol is built around in response to customer needs. You will have a huge amount of autonomy while steering crypto's next unicorn to its potential. We are building a $1B+ protocol while keeping the team extremely lean (<10), so you will have significant upside as we grow.

You must be elite at:

• Writing high performance, bulletproof Rust
• Interacting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana at a protocol level (running nodes, indexing data, and creating transactions)
• Understanding how DeFi protocols work at a smart contract level, be able to reason about risks and interact with them
• Maximizing your productivity with the latest AI tools
• Crypto native - self custody crypto and regularly use popular protocols
• A high school or college dropout
• The most locked in person you know

A bit about Rift:

Today over 90% of crypto is traded on centralized exchanges ($12T/yr in spot). This is because assets users want to trade are fragmented across chains, making it impossible to do without middlemen. The protocols that attempt to solve this today have much worse rates, swap amounts, asset selection, and UX compared to their centralized alternatives.

We solved this by creating a multichain trading protocol that allows for trading native assets in size, with verifiably lowest price execution. This is possible with a new primitive: multichain smart contracts (protocol nodes run inside TEEs), unlocking previously impossible onchain actions which we're just scratching the surface of.

We recently raised a seed round from the top fund in crypto (Paradigm), are live on Ethereum and Base with the best rate BTC trading, and just went live with our first integrators. We are expanding to every major chain in the coming weeks.

Interested in this job?