Senior Applied Cryptographer

Monad Labs is a venture-backed startup building the Monad blockchain, a high-performance smart contract platform built to bring world adoption to decentralized apps. Monad delivers 1000x the throughput of Ethereum—10,000 transactions per second—while maintaining backward-compatibility for Ethereum smart contracts, offering users and developers the best of both worlds.

Founded by Jump Trading alums, our team solves challenging problems in distributed systems engineering and low-latency optimization, authoring novel open source code to implement a new, high-performance, high-reliability, high-value system.

After recently raising a $19 million seed round backed by Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Naval Ravikant, and other leaders in the crypto space, we are hiring a few more exceptional engineers who want to work on challenging and impactful problems in a fast-paced environment.

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

• You’ll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact
• You’ll work with and learn from a small, exceptional team
• You’ll receive a competitive salary, along with equity
• You’ll shape the culture as an early employee and make impactful contributions from day one
• You’ll be part of a flat, results-driven organization
• Your work will be deeply impactful, enabling much cheaper and more efficient decentralized computation and ultimately paving the way for new dapps that improve many people’s lives.

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; insurance coverage; home office equipment stipend; monthly wellness/fitness stipend; and 10 company-observed holidays.