Monad Labs is a venture-backed startup building the Monad blockchain, a new high-performance EVM Layer-1 blockchain introducing superscalar pipelining to the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Monad introduces pipelining to improve bottlenecks in state access, smart contract execution, and distributed consensus to improve the performance-decentralization frontier and help decentralized apps scale.

Our team currently hails mostly from high-frequency trading and kernel driver development. Our technical founders met in 2014 at Jump Trading and have been working on low-latency scalable systems since then. After raising $19M from Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Naval Ravikant, and other leaders in the crypto space, our team is hiring exceptional researchers and engineers who want to work on challenging problems that help decentralized systems scale.

The Role

We are looking for an exceptional Senior Applied Cryptographer who is interested in cryptographic protocols and their application to blockchain. You will play a leading role in designing and implementing critical components of the blockchain, such as signature schemes, threshold encryption, distributed key generation, and zero-knowledge proofs. Your work will significantly contribute to the security and scalability of the platform.

Who you are

• Resourceful and self-motivated
• Team oriented, collaborative, and a good communicator
• Adaptive; able to make meaningful contributions in a fast-paced environment
• Opinionated about software architecture
• Motivated to push the limits of system performance through repeated optimization
• Interested in building high-value fault-tolerant distributed systems

Requirements:

• Advanced degree in applied cryptography
• 5 years of experience in applied cryptography in an academic or industrial setting
• Excellent knowledge of modern cryptography primitives, such as zero-knowledge proofs, signature schemes, threshold encryption, and MPC
• Strong programming skills in languages like python or C++

Bonus:

• Research publications
• Contributions to open source projects
• Startup experience

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and implementing crucial cryptographic components of the blockchain, such as signature schemes, threshold encryption, distributed key generation, and zero-knowledge proofs.
• Conducting literature review and researching opportunities to incorporate the latest advances into the workflow.

Why work with us

Working at Monad Labs means doing challenging work on a high-impact problem with exceptional teammates.

Here are some of the people you’ll work with:

• James, performance engineering expert and system architect; previously designed and built ultra-low-latency systems for a top high-frequency trading team at Jump Trading;
• Ariq, expert at low-level firmware and software programming; previously a senior engineer at Arista Networks, where he served as lead maintainer on multiple linux kernel networking drivers for Arista EOS devices;
• Aashish, expert systems designer and hacker, previously the first engineer at Pattern Research, a leading crypto HFT firm, where he designed and built the entire trading stack from scratch; graduated from MIT at age 19
• And others (see bios on our our team page!)

We think you’ll enjoy working with us, and that you’ll find the work to be extremely impactful and challenging.

Salary and benefits

Minimum full-time salary of $200,000. (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary; a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.)

Monad Labs’ benefits include unlimited and encouraged paid time off; health coverage; home office equipment stipend; monthly wellness/fitness stipend; and 10 company-observed holidays.

The majority of our team is in NYC and works together a few days a week. We are open to remote candidates, with a preference for candidates based in NYC.