Senior Protocol Engineer - Bitcoin L2 Rollup (Remote)

RootstockLabs; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work from EU/LA

Learning sponsorship

CoWorking access

Paid time off

Job summary

RootstockLabs seeks a Senior Protocol Engineer to join its Rollup team and scale a Bitcoin-secured Layer 2. The role is hands-on, remote, full-time, with responsibility across sequencing, block derivation, consensus and finality, as well as bridge and proof systems.

You’ll operate on a codebase that underpins live network activity and contribute to architecture decisions. You’ll collaborate with product, DevOps and security to plan releases, review code, and improve performance across

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering, with at least 2 years in blockchain core or protocol development (node clients, consensus, etc.).
• Solid production experience in Go, Rust or Java.
• Deep knowledge of blockchain internals and the EVM: consensus, P2P networking, state/storage, transaction lifecycle, JSON-RPC.
• Experience with large codebases you did not write.
• AI-assisted development is a core part of your work and ownership.
• Strong English communication in an international/remote team.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain core protocol components: execution and consensus clients, sequencer, block derivation and batch submission to the parent chain.
• Work on the bridge and the proof system: deposits, withdrawals, cross-layer messages and state validation.
• Maintain a large open source codebase: ensure safety for a live network and easy evolvability.
• Review code, write design docs and RFCs, participate in architecture decisions.
• Test and debug a distributed system: unit tests, devnets, reorgs, performance issues.
• Deliver and operate releases on public chains: upgrades, hard forks, monitoring and incidents.

Skills

5+ years experience

Go

Rust

Java

EVM knowledge

Large codebases

AI-assisted development

Autonomy

English

Layer 2 rollups

Bitcoin knowledge

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

Solidity reading

Tools

Go

Rust

Java

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

JSON-RPC

Job description

RootstockLabs seeks a Senior Protocol Engineer to join its Rollup team and scale a Bitcoin-secured Layer 2. The role is hands-on, remote, full-time, with responsibility across sequencing, block derivation, consensus and finality, as well as bridge and proof systems.

You’ll operate on a codebase that underpins live network activity and contribute to architecture decisions. You’ll collaborate with product, DevOps and security to plan releases, review code, and improve performance across