IT - Cyber Security Developer

Aquent; Southlake (TX); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental and vision plans

Paid sick leave

401(k) with match

Job summary

Aquent seeks an expert software architect to define custody architecture for digital asset operations, focusing on HSMs, MPC, and secure key management. You will drive policy governance, disaster recovery, and incident response, partnering with security and risk teams to ensure defense-in-depth and zero-trust principles.

You will shape an enterprise custody framework, scale across assets and chains, and apply GenAI to accelerate engineering rigor, architecture quality, and documentation.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with security-sensitive or cryptographic systems.
• Hands-on experience with HSMs, MPC frameworks, and secure key management systems.
• Experience with security tooling such as Slither, Mythril, Foundry Fuzzing.

Responsibilities

• Define custody architecture and critical design decisions across HSMs, MPC, key storage, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, and incident response.
• Lead the design of the Custody Policy Engine and governance controls.
• Own disaster recovery strategies and incident response runbooks for custody operations.
• Ensure architecture scales across wallets, blockchains, environments, and tokenized products.
• Leverage GenAI tools to accelerate architecture design, threat modeling, and documentation.

Skills

HSMs

MPC frameworks

Key management

Security auditing

Cryptography languages

Distributed systems

Tools

Slither

Mythril

Foundry Fuzzing

Job description

What You’ll Do

In this high-impact individual contributor role, you will define custody architecture and spearhead critical design decisions across Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), key storage, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, and incident response. Your contributions will be pivotal in shaping the security and resilience of our client’s digital asset operations.

Custody Key Management & Cryptographic Architecture: Design, implement, and evolve institutional-grade key management architectures, including HSMs and MPC. You will define secure key generation, storage, rotation, signing, and recovery processes, establishing clear trade-offs and architectural patterns across hot, warm, and cold storage models. Ensure all cryptographic designs meet stringent regulatory, security, and audit expectations, partnering closely with cybersecurity and risk teams to embed defense-in-depth and zero-trust principles.

Custody Policy Engine & Governance: Lead the design of the Custody Policy Engine, governing authorization, approvals, limits, segregation of duties, transaction controls, and exception handling. You will ensure policies are code-driven, deterministic, observable, and testable, translating business, legal, and risk requirements into clear, enforceable technical controls. Serve as a trusted technical advisor on all custody governance topics.

Disaster Recovery, Resilience & Incident Ownership: Own custody-specific disaster recovery strategies, including key recovery, quorum loss scenarios, and chain events. Author and maintain incident response and recovery runbooks for custody-related failures or security events, partnering with operations, security, and SRE teams to ensure practicable and tested recovery procedures. Lead post-incident technical analysis, root cause reviews, and long-term remediation strategies.

Overall Custody Architecture & Risk Posture: Act as the authoritative voice for custody architecture, ensuring consistency across wallets, blockchains, environments, and platforms. Proactively identify architectural and operational risks, proposing mitigation strategies with clear trade-offs. Ensure custody designs scale across various assets, chains, and future tokenized products, influencing enterprise standards by raising the bar on security, resilience, and technical rigor.

AI-Augmented Engineering Excellence: Leverage GenAI and agentic AI tools to accelerate architecture design, threat modeling, documentation, testing, and reviews. Set expectations for AI-assisted engineering rigor, focusing on speed with correctness, not shortcuts. Partner with engineering teams to elevate the architecture, code, and documentation quality across all custody components.

What You’ll Achieve

Your success will be measured by the security, resilience, and audibility of key management and policy systems. Failure modes will be thoroughly understood, modeled, and operationally prepared for. Incidents will be handled with clarity, speed, and technical confidence, and the custody architecture will scale seamlessly across assets, chains, and tokenized products without compromising risk posture. You will be recognized as the technical backbone of the digital asset custody strategy.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep specialization in security-sensitive or cryptographic systems.
• Strong hands-on experience with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC) frameworks, and secure key management systems.
• Experience with security tooling such as Slither, Mythril, Foundry Fuzzing.
• Proficiency with common cryptography implementation languages such as C, C++, Rust, Go.
• Experience collaborating with security auditors.
• Proven ability to design systems where failure has material risk implications.
• Strong grounding in distributed systems, secure architectures, and fault-tolerant design.
• Track record of acting as a technical authority without formal people management responsibilities.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with crypto custody, digital asset platforms, or blockchain infrastructure.
• Prior ownership of incident response, disaster recovery design, or security runbooks.
• Ability to articulate risk-based trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A systems thinker who effectively connects technology, security, policy, and operations.
• Comfortable challenging assumptions and raising concerns early in high-stakes environments.
• Experience applying AI tools to complex engineering workflows.

About Aquent Talent

Aquent Talent connects the best talent in marketing, creative, and design with the world’s biggest brands.

Our eligible talent get access to amazing benefits like subsidized health, vision, and dental plans, paid sick leave, and retirement plans with a match.

Aquent is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We’re about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.

#LI-JR1