Distributed Systems Engineer

Monad Labs is a venture-backed tech startup building the Monad blockchain, a high-performance smart contract platform built to bring world adoption to decentralized apps. Monad combines unparalleled performance (10,000 transactions per second) with portability (full compatibility for Ethereum smart contracts), leveraging innovations in parallel execution and distributed consensus.

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 problems with massive impact in a fast-paced environment.

The Role

We are looking for strong Distributed Systems Engineers and Researchers to help build an efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) algorithm for maintaining consistent state across a distributed network. Experience with crypto is not expected.

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:

• Experience with Distributed database/state machines
• Understand Consensus protocols like paxos and raft
• Familiar with the Byzantine Generals problems - Ideally familiar with BFT consensus algorithms
• Experience with Gossip protocols
• Understand concepts like vector clocks, synchronous vs asynchronous networks
• Understand network protocols (TCP/UDP)
• Distributed tracing and debugging in distributed environments
• Experience in programming with a statically-typed language (eg. C++/Rust/Go)

Bonus:

• Contributions to open source projects
• Startup experience
• Interest in crypto

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building a distributed system kept in sync by a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism
• Improving and optimizing performance of the consensus mechanism
• Developing tests to prove the reliability and correctness of the consensus mechanism
• Researching state-of-the-art BFT algorithms

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

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.

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; 100% medical, dental, and vision coverage; home office equipment stipend; monthly wellness/fitness stipend; and 11 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.