Protocol Engineer

Rockstar is recruiting for a foundation dedicated to supporting the growth, decentralization, and sustainability of a leading decentralized finance protocol. This client is committed to driving value in key focus areas such as Protocol and Innovation, Developers, Governance, Research, and Security through strategic grant-making.

The foundation is seeking a Protocol Engineer to join their technical team and contribute to the development of smart contracts for in-house projects, the protocol, Unichain, and grantee collaborations.

As a Protocol Engineer, the candidate will play a key role in designing, implementing, and optimizing smart contract systems. The role involves participating in technical design discussions, weighing trade-offs between optimization, flexibility, and integration, while also providing design feedback for ecosystem participants such as hook developers and Unichain DeFi projects.

What the Candidate Will Do:

- Design, implement, and optimize Solidity-based smart contracts for projects related to the protocol, focusing on security, efficiency, and maintainability.

- Provide technical guidance and design feedback for external developers building on the protocol and Unichain, including hook developers and DeFi projects.

- Explore and prototype new DeFi primitives, trading mechanisms, and smart contract architectures to expand the protocol’s capabilities.

- Participate in design sessions and code reviews, ensuring high standards in code quality, security, and organization.

- Implement unit tests, fuzz testing, and gas optimizations to ensure smart contract reliability and performance.

As a Protocol Engineer, the candidate may work on:

- Hooks and reference implementations for the protocol's latest version

- Experimental swapping UX designs

- Indexers and graph traversal algorithms

- Composable DeFi legos

- SDK abstractions and developer tooling

- Periphery integrations such as liquidity management tools and swap-and-add functionalities

What the Candidate Brings to the Table:

Required Skills & Experience:

- Strong understanding of DeFi patterns and smart contract architecture

- At least two years of experience writing complex Solidity smart contracts with an emphasis on readability, maintainability, and security

- Proficiency with Foundry, including cheatcodes, foundry.toml, and script execution

- Experience with unit testing and fuzz testing for smart contract security

- Confidence using Git and managing version control in a collaborative engineering environment

- Ability to design clean abstractions and reusable smart contract components

- Familiarity with the protocol's latest version contracts and related DeFi protocols

Nice to Haves:

- Experience with Yul and low-level opcodes for gas-efficient smart contract development

- Knowledge of gas optimization techniques

- Experience with invariant testing for smart contract correctness

- Public speaking experience for developer outreach and technical presentations

- Familiarity with TypeScript for SDK and front-end integrations

About the Foundation:

In pursuit of a more open and fair financial system, the foundation supports the growth, decentralization, and sustainability of the community. Through grants, they are driving value in five key focus areas: Protocol and Innovation, Developers, Governance, Research, and Security. Their grant-making approach is designed to maximize positive impact, bringing in new contributors to the community who focus on building new initiatives, committees, products, infrastructure, and more. To learn more about their community impact, visit their website.