Protocol Security Researcher for DeFi & AI-Driven Review

Avalanche; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Protocol Security Researcher to help build and strengthen its internal protocol security function. The role sits at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review.

You will review major protocol changes before deployment, assess risks across assets and integrations, and influence security decisions with an attacker mindset. This is a proactive, high-impact security role across the ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant security experience.
• Strong smart contract security background.
• Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes.
• Attacker mindset: think how it could be exploited.
• Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms: lending, liquidations, oracles, collateral, governance, integrations.
• Evidence of using AI to improve security research, review quality, or throughput.
• Clear written communication to engineers and non-security stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Review major Aave protocol changes before external audit or deployment.
• Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, and integrations.
• Participate in design and architecture discussions early to influence security decisions.
• Identify risks in Aave-adjacent systems, including assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, and dependencies.
• Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and evaluate its effectiveness in real review workflows.
• Turn review findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, assumptions, and testing/monitoring ideas.
• Collaborate with monitoring and incident response teams when review findings imply operational detection/response needs.
• Collaborate with external auditors by helping define scope, known risks, and areas of concern.

Skills

Smart contract security

DeFi knowledge

Independent review

AI-assisted tooling

Clear written comms

Job description

Aave Labs is seeking a Protocol Security Researcher to help build and strengthen its internal protocol security function. The role sits at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review.

You will review major protocol changes before deployment, assess risks across assets and integrations, and influence security decisions with an attacker mindset. This is a proactive, high-impact security role across the ecosystem.