Senior Smart Contract Engineer

Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem.  

SDF is working on projects that push the envelope on Blockchain technology, from cross-chain interoperability to decentralized finance. This work allows underserved populations to take part in exciting new financial systems. 

The highest engineering priority at the SDF this year is the creation and deployment of a state-of-the-art smart contracting framework for the Stellar blockchain. Smart contracts are expected to turbocharge innovation and growth on Stellar. This is a unique opportunity to come in at the ground floor of a nascent blockchain smart contracting framework. 

As a Smart Contract Engineer, you will be a founding member of the team that will design and deliver the smart contract platform, a technically challenging and high impact role, with significant autonomy to execute on the creation of a development stack that will profoundly impact the entire Stellar ecosystem. As smart contracts gain mindshare, we expect ongoing rapid iteration and innovation based on community feedback.

SDF has a robust engineering ladder, with clear growth paths for both individual contributors and managers.

In this role you will: 

• Be a key contributor to greenfield tools, libraries and services for Stellar smart contract developers.
• Be a champion for best practices in smart contract development.
• Work on tech at the cutting edge of the intersection between blockchain and finance.
• Work with blockchain experts, ecosystem pioneers and stakeholders.
• Collaborate to solve challenging novel problems in decentralized software.
• Be involved with all aspects of the software development process - from vision to final implementation.
• Identify patterns in developer needs and design new protocols and services to increase developer velocity across our entire ecosystem.
• Engage with our community of open source developers and partners on projects that encompass many different frameworks, languages, and ideas.
• Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for all of engineering at SDF.
• Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks in order to continue scaling our API services.
• Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications - we take design seriously, and we encourage everyone to be a part of our RFC processes.

You have: 

• 4+ years of experience developing software on a team.
• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and information retrieval.
• A curiosity that drives learning and understanding.
• A solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build components that are reusable, extensible, and modular.
• Knowledge of existing frameworks and open source tools and are willing to build new frameworks when open ones do not exist.
• Enthusiasm about working on a small, growing team where you’ll be given a lot of autonomy.
• Openness, empathy, and care about putting the best ideas forward in a collaborative and helpful manner.

Bonus Points if:

• You have created developer tools for smart contract developers
• You have developed top tier smart contracts
• You are proficient in Rust

We offer competitive pay with a base salary range for this position of $145,000 - $190,000 depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, we offer lumen-denominated grants along with the following perks and benefits: