Protocol Engineering Lead

Cielo; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Quant is seeking a Protocol Engineering Lead to own the smart-contract release train, oversee external audits on every release, and manage the diff against upstream Optimism. You will work on a permissioned EVM rollup on the OP Stack and contribute to production readiness ahead of a 2027 launch.

You will explain the chain’s behavior to reliability engineers, security teams, and even bankers, bridging tech and business.

Qualifications

• Deep Solidity and EVM experience with audited contracts.
• Strong understanding of rollup architectures, OP Stack preferred.
• Experience maintaining forks of large upstream codebases.
• Ability to explain chain behavior to reliability engineers, security teams, and banks.

Responsibilities

• Own the smart-contract release train and ensure audits on every release.
• Manage diffs against upstream Optimism and document divergences.
• Explain chain behavior to non-engineering audiences including banks and security teams.
• Collaborate with the New York team to advance deployment readiness.

Skills

Solidity

EVM

Audits

Rollup architecture

Fork maintenance

Technical communication

Tools

Git

Code diffs

Job description

We're partnering with Quant, a global leader in digital transformation and technology solutions, seeking a Protocol Engineering Lead to join their team.

Protocol Engineering Lead

Most people who write smart contracts never have to keep them running afterward. This job is the other half.

The Clearing House has selected Quant to power its On-Chain Money Initiative, and the protocol work behind it, a permissioned EVM rollup on the OP Stack, is moving into production ahead of an expected launch in the first half of 2027. You would own the smart-contract release train, external audits on every release, and our diff against upstream Optimism: what we take, what we hold, and where we diverge on purpose.

You would also explain the chain's unexpected behavior to people who are not protocol engineers. The pool of people who can do this is small.

You will need

• Deep Solidity and EVM experience, on contracts that held real value and went through external audit.
• Real understanding of rollup architecture, ideally the OP Stack. The mechanics rather than the vocabulary.
• To have maintained a fork of a large upstream codebase, and to know what that costs over time.
• To be able to explain chain behavior to reliability engineers, security engineers and eventually to a bank.

Useful, not essential

• Permissioned or enterprise EVM deployments.
• Settlement, payments or tokenization rather than consumer applications.
• Public contributions. We will read them.

There is more to this than we can put in an advertisement.

About Quant

Almost all the money in the economy is commercial bank money, and almost none of it moves on chain. Quant is a leading provider of programmable money infrastructure, and our technology changes that: it lets banks issue, move and settle tokenized deposits around the clock, automatically and securely, while staying connected to the systems they already run on. It is already deployed in regulated environments with central and commercial banks in the UK and around the world, including work on the digital pound and the digital euro.

The Clearing House, whose networks clear and settle more than $2 trillion a day, has now selected Quant to power its On-Chain Money Initiative: a new interoperable payments network that will let financial institutions of all sizes clear and settle tokenized deposits, with connectivity to the RTP® and CHIPS® networks. Our technology provides the network's interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer, enabling payments that settle immediately and transactions that trigger automatically once agreed conditions are met.

Through our Tokenized Deposits-as-a-Service solution, banks of any size can join without building new infrastructure themselves. The network is expected to become available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027, with use cases across corporate treasury, liquidity management, cross-border payments and digital asset settlement. We are building the New York team that will run it.