Protocol Security Researcher: DeFi Security & AI-Driven Review

Framework Ventures; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Protocol Security Researcher to strengthen our internal security function for the protocol. You will assess changes before deployment, reason about risk, and help reduce protocol risk across Aave’s systems.

You will review major changes, perform attacker-driven analyses, and influence security decisions early in design. Collaboration with external auditors and AI-assisted tooling are key parts of the role.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of security experience.
• Strong smart contract security background.
• Independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes.
• Attacker mindset: explain how issues could be exploited.
• Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms (lending, liquidations, oracles, governance).
• Evidence of using AI to improve security research or reviews.
• Clear written communication to engineers and non-security stakeholders.
• Good judgment about severity, exploitability, and materiality of findings.

Responsibilities

• Review major protocol changes before external audits or deployment.
• Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts and protocol mechanisms.
• Participate in early design discussions to influence security decisions.
• Identify risks in Aave-adjacent systems and critical dependencies.
• Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and assess its effectiveness.
• Turn findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, and testing ideas.
• Collaborate with incident response when review findings imply detection needs.
• Collaborate with external auditors to define scope and concerns.

Skills

Security experience

Smart contract security

Code review

Attacker mindset

DeFi knowledge

AI in security

Written communication

Judgment of severity

Job description

Aave Labs is seeking a Protocol Security Researcher to strengthen our internal security function for the protocol. You will assess changes before deployment, reason about risk, and help reduce protocol risk across Aave’s systems.

You will review major changes, perform attacker-driven analyses, and influence security decisions early in design. Collaboration with external auditors and AI-assisted tooling are key parts of the role.