Lead Blockchain Security Developer (Canton)

OpenZeppelin; United States; Remote; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company in-person gatherings around the world

Flexible time off

Paid parental leave

Work-from-home equipment stipend up to $500 USD

Medical insurance coverage

Learning & Development opportunities

Working with a global team

Job summary

OpenZeppelin is seeking an engineer to join a project building the open-source DeFi foundations for the Canton blockchain. You will own the development of the OpenZeppelin Contracts Library for Daml and lead the design of privacy-preserving decentralized protocols.

This role requires a security-first mindset and significant experience in UTXO-based protocol development and DeFi engineering. OpenZeppelin offers a fully remote position with various global benefits.

Qualifications

• Experience with non-trivial Daml in production, including templates and multi-party authorization.
• Production work in privacy-preserving or UTXO-based architecture expected.
• Experience with non-trivial DeFi primitives and knowledge of security pitfalls.
• Demonstrable experience in auditing, breaking, or hardening production systems.
• Built reusable developer libraries and have opinions on extensibility patterns.
• Experience with cross-chain messaging protocols.
• Ability to design with compliance constraints and credential gates.
• Measurable productivity gains from AI tools.

Responsibilities

• Own development of the OpenZeppelin Contracts Library for Daml.
• Lead technical design and implementation of Reference Implementations.
• Implement OZ Daml versions of various standards and coordinate with Digital Asset.
• Run roadmap and design discussions with partners.
• Collaborate with auditors on threat models and reviews.
• Use AI systems as core tools every day.
• Apply AI to security work and share findings.

Skills

Production Daml fluency

3+ years of experience in UTXO-based protocol development

3+ years of experience on DeFi engineering in production

Security-first mindset

Library / SDK API design taste

Cross-chain interoperability exposure

Institutional / compliance design fluency

An AI-native workflow

Experience applying AI to security work

Fluency in client-facing communication

Autonomy and proactivity

Job description

The Canton Network engagement

This role joins us at the start of a 24-month, multi-million-dollar commitment to build the open-source DeFi foundations of the world's most institutional blockchain, approved by the Canton Foundation. The scope includes:

• 8 production-ready Reference Implementations. Privacy-preserving DEX, lending protocol, cross-chain stablecoin settlement, confidential auction launchpad, and four more defined in year two. End-to-end blueprints that other teams will fork.
• The OpenZeppelin Contracts Library for Daml. The audited foundation Canton developers will import—vaults, hooks, RBAC, credentials, modular multi-sig accounts, standardized messaging gateway, DeFi math, staking, vesting, auctions, and more. The same role our Solidity library plays today, on Canton.
• Canton standards implementation. Audited Daml implementations of CIP-56 (Token Standard), CIP-86 (ERC-20 Compatible Interface), CIP-103 (dApp Standard), and CIP-104 (Traffic-Based App Rewards) — designed to interoperate cleanly with the broader Splice ecosystem and with ChainSafe's CIP-86 middleware.
• 55 researcher-weeks of dedicated security capacity. Smart-contract audits, full-stack reviews, pen tests—amplified by OpenZeppelin's AI security agent in the workflow. Every release ships with a published audit report.
• AI-native developer experience for a new ecosystem. Contracts Wizard, UI Builder, MCP Server, Claude Plugin, AI Skills—all built for Canton, all AI-native end-to-end. You'll help define how AI-native engineering looks on a non-EVM stack.

You will work alongside Digital Asset, the Canton Foundation, and ChainSafe. The deliverables become the standard others build on. The work is public; the impact is measurable; the partners are the institutions reshaping how capital moves. Canton is your first focus, but you'll keep contributing across the broader Secure Development portfolio as the work demands.

Location

OpenZeppelin is a fully remote organization, however candidates for this position must be located within UTC-8 to UTC+3 time zones to be considered.

Within this, you will:

• Own the development of the OpenZeppelin Contracts Library for Daml end-to-end: vaults, hooks, RBAC, credentials, messaging gateway, accounts, and more. The audited primitives Canton developers will import.
• Lead the technical design and implementation of the year-1 Reference Implementations: privacy-preserving DEX, lending protocol, cross-chain stablecoin settlement, and confidential auction launchpad.
• Implement and shepherd the OZ Daml versions of CIP-56, CIP-86, CIP-103, and CIP-104. Coordinate with Digital Asset on spec evolution and with ChainSafe on middleware alignment.
• Run client-facing roadmap, design, and milestone discussions with Digital Asset, the Canton Foundation, and ChainSafe.
• Collaborate with OpenZeppelin's auditors and security researchers on threat models, audit prep, and full-stack reviews for every Reference Implementation.
• Use AI systems as core daily tools. Extend them: build agents, skills, and workflows that compound the team's leverage on the Canton engagement and beyond.
• Apply AI directly to security work and share what works back to the team: audit assistance, invariant generation, spec analysis, fuzzing harnesses, custom evals.
• Contribute developer-experience and security feedback upstream into the Canton protocol, Splice, the Daml SDK, and the Splice Wallet Kernel.
• Conduct open-ended research around privacy-preserving DeFi, multi-party authorization patterns, and Canton-specific primitives; you'll have time to publish and contribute back to OpenZeppelin's body of knowledge.

You have

• Production Daml fluency. You have shipped non-trivial Daml in production. You understand templates, choices, controllers/observers/signatories, multi-party authorization, sub-transaction views, and propose/accept patterns as first-class primitives. Running an SV, contributing to Splice internals, governance, or Canton Coin tokenomics.
• 3+ years of experience in UTXO-based protocol development. You can reason about Canton's privacy boundaries the way an EVM developer reasons about storage slots. Prior production work in a privacy-preserving or UTXO-based architecture (Canton, Cardano, Midnight, Zcash, Aleo, Mina, or similar) is expected.
• 3+ years of experience on DeFi engineering in production. You have shipped non-trivial DeFi primitives in production: AMMs, vaults (ERC-4626 or equivalent), lending protocols, cross-chain settlement. You understand the security pitfalls of each.
• A security-first mindset. This is non-negotiable. You think adversarially about every line of code you write, and you have demonstrable experience either auditing, breaking, or hardening production systems—published threat models, audit reports, responsible disclosures, or equivalent output.
• Library / SDK API design taste. You've built reusable, import-first developer libraries, not just applications. You have opinions on extensibility patterns (hooks, modular components, override points) and on what makes an audited primitive pleasant to consume.
• Cross-chain interoperability exposure. Production work with at least one major cross-chain messaging protocol (Chainlink CCIP, LayerZero, Wormhole, Axelar, or similar).
• Institutional / compliance design fluency: You can design with credential gates, multi-party attestation, custody flows, and compliance hooks as native constraints.
• An AI-native workflow. Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent is your daily driver. You have measurable productivity gains to show for it and clear opinions on how to use these tools well. You have shipped at least one non-trivial AI-powered tool, agent, or automation pipeline in production using the Anthropic SDK, MCP, custom evals, or comparable.
• Experience applying AI to security work. You've already used AI as a serious instrument in security workflows: audit assistance, vulnerability research, fuzzing, invariant or spec analysis, static-analysis augmentation, or similar.
• Fluency in client-facing communication (English).
• Autonomy and proactivity.

Nice to have

• Cryptography or financial-engineering background. Privacy-preserving DeFi rewards both.
• Institutional finance background. Capital-markets microstructure, custody, compliance flows, RWA tokenization, settlement.
• Hands-on experience with non-EVM ecosystems. Starknet, Stellar/Soroban, Arbitrum Stylus, Aptos, Move-based chains.
• Open-source contributions to widely-used libraries in the smart-contract or AI-tooling space.

Benefits

• Company in-person gatherings in different locations around the world
• Fully remote work
• Flexible time off
• Paid parental leave
• One time work-from-home equipment stipend of up to $500 USD
• Medical insurance coverage
• Learning & Development opportunities
• Work with a global team in a fast-growing industry

OpenZeppelin is an equal opportunity employer and we value different perspectives. We are committed to building a diverse workforce. This includes but is not limited to gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, national origin and other characteristics that make each one of us unique. In this uniqueness, we find the most value. Come join us!