[Hiring] Lead Protocol Engineer @MLabs

Role Description

We are building the next generation of DeFi trading, leveraging decentralized technologies to democratize access to global financial markets. As the largest builder product on our core platform, we have processed north of $50 billion in cumulative trading volume and achieved eight figures in revenue in the past year. We are a small, highly technical team focused on results, and are seeking a Lead Protocol Engineer to architect and scale our smart contract infrastructure on HyperEVM.

You will be the technical owner and lead protocol developer, responsible for the design, implementation, and deployment of smart contracts on the HyperEVM. This role is ideal for a strong individual contributor who thrives in a low-process, high-trust, and ambiguous 0-to-1 environment. You will be building DeFi primitives and trading infrastructure designed to scale to millions of traders and billions in daily volume.

• Protocol Ownership: Design, implement, and ship production-grade contracts powering core trading flows (positions, collateral, fee routing, and settlement).
• DeFi Architecture: Architect complex DeFi primitives end-to-end, including staking/locking, liquidity mechanisms, vaults, and critical risk controls (circuit breakers, kill-switches) with explicit gas/latency budgets.
• Security & Correctness: Harden security by modeling MEV/price manipulation threats; write invariants and fuzz tests (Foundry/Echidna); integrate static analysis (Slither); and own the audit scope and response.
• Safe Upgradeability: Engineer safe contract upgradeability by choosing patterns (UUPS/transparent/beacon), writing storage-layout tests, and managing migrations with staged rollouts.
• Operational Excellence: Define on-chain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), emit analytics-ready events, build monitors/alerts, and own incident response with rollback/patch runbooks, treating releases with SRE rigor.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping production Solidity (Yul/Huff a plus) and 8+ years overall engineering experience.
• Mastery of complex EVM patterns like access control, upgradeability (proxies, beacons), Create2, and minimal clones.
• Strong hands-on experience and intuition across core DeFi primitives (AMMs, staking/locking, stablecoin mechanics, liquidations, fee accounting, and oracle design under adversarial conditions).
• Proficient with professional tools: Foundry (forge/anvil/cast), Tenderly, Slither, Echidna/fuzzing, gas profiling, and comfort with viem/TypeScript for deployments and indexers.
• Proven ability to anticipate failure modes (reentrancy, price manipulation, rounding/precision, approval abuse) and design comprehensive mitigations.
• Proven track record of stable storage layouts, robust migration scripts, and safe, multi-stage mainnet upgrades.
• Experience integrating with oracles, signature standards (EIP-712, Permit2), and bridging/cross-chain messaging—ideally including HyperEVM.
• Proven ability to operate with high agency in low-process, high-trust, 0→1 environments.

Benefits

• Highly competitive, top-of-market compensation ($200K - $300K) and equity in a high-potential startup, plus uncapped bonuses based on performance.
• Play a direct role in building truly 0-to-1 products and scaling them to millions of users.
• Work in a small, highly technical team with an open, flat, and results-focused culture that values autonomy and rapid execution.
• Healthy, catered meals daily (where applicable/hub-dependent).