Job Description

Founding Engineer (Blockchain / Rust) – Stealth Startup | New York City (Onsite)

Compensation: Up to $250k base salary plus meaningful equity

Location: Manhattan, New York (onsite, full-time)

About the Company

Our client is a stealth-mode startup building a next-generation high-frequency trading platform that bridges Web3 and traditional finance. Their mission is to redefine decentralized trading infrastructure with unmatched performance, reliability, and transparency.

Backed by leading investors and founded by experts in quantitative trading, distributed systems, and low-latency infrastructure, the company is assembling a world-class technical team. They are seeking a Founding Blockchain Engineer to design and implement the distributed core that powers the platform’s execution and consensus layers.

The Role

As the Founding Blockchain Engineer, you’ll design and build the foundational distributed systems and consensus mechanisms that ensure the platform’s speed, correctness, and security. You’ll work at the intersection of systems engineering, cryptography, and networking—pushing the limits of what’s possible in decentralized, high-performance trading infrastructure.

This is an onsite, full-time role based in Manhattan. You’ll collaborate closely with the founding team in a deeply technical environment, helping define the company’s architecture, security model, and long-term technical direction.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop core blockchain components including storage layers, execution engines, transaction pools, gossip protocols, and state-machine replication
• Implement, harden, and extend consensus algorithms to ensure safety, liveness, and high performance under real-world network conditions
• Profile and optimize CPU, memory, I/O, and network stacks to identify bottlenecks and achieve low-latency, high-throughput performance
• Integrate advanced cryptographic primitives such as hash functions, Merkle proofs, digital signatures, encryption schemes, and key-exchange protocols
• Design and build reliable peer discovery , NAT traversal , connection pooling , load balancing , and encrypted networking (TLS)
• Develop and maintain multiplexed transports (TCP, UDP, QUIC) for robust peer-to-peer communication

Candidate Profile

• 2+ years of experience building blockchain-based distributed systems or consensus engines
• Expert proficiency in Rust and other low-level systems languages (e.g. C/C++)
• Deep understanding of consensus protocols (e.g. PBFT, HotStuff, Tendermint)
• Strong grasp of cryptography fundamentals : hashing, Merkle trees, multisignatures, elliptic-curve cryptography
• Solid experience with networking protocols and systems: TCP/UDP, QUIC, peer discovery, NAT traversal
• Hands-on experience with key-value store databases (e.g. RocksDB, MDBX) for high-throughput state storage
• Authorized to work in the United States
• Comfortable in a fast-paced, high-ownership startup environment and motivated by complex technical challenges

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive base salary up to $250,000
• Meaningful equity in a venture-backed, high-impact early-stage startup
• Opportunity to shape the core blockchain architecture of a next-generation trading platform
• Work alongside a world-class founding team with deep expertise in trading systems, distributed computing, and cryptography

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