[Hiring] Rust & Smart Contract Engineer @CITA LABS

Role Description

We are looking for a Senior Rust & Smart Contract Engineer to design, build, and maintain secure, high-performance blockchain systems and smart contracts. You will work on core blockchain infrastructure, on-chain protocols, and integrations that interact with decentralized networks. This role requires strong Rust engineering skills, hands-on experience developing production smart contracts, and a deep understanding of blockchain architecture, security, and distributed systems.

You will work closely with backend, security, DevOps, and product engineers to take blockchain features from architecture and protocol design through implementation, testing, security review, deployment, and production monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and maintain production-grade blockchain applications and smart contracts using Rust.
• Build and maintain smart contracts/programs for ecosystems such as Solana and other Rust-based blockchain platforms.
• Design secure on-chain architectures for asset management, payments, DeFi, wallets, or other blockchain-based financial applications.
• Develop high-performance off-chain services that interact with blockchain networks, RPC nodes, indexers, and smart contracts.
• Design transaction construction, signing, submission, confirmation, and failure-recovery workflows.
• Integrate blockchain protocols and smart contracts with backend services and APIs.
• Review smart contract code for security vulnerabilities, logical errors, economic attack vectors, and performance issues.
• Optimize smart contracts for compute usage, transaction costs, storage, and throughput.
• Build comprehensive unit, integration, simulation, and end-to-end testing frameworks.
• Investigate production incidents involving failed transactions, RPC infrastructure, chain congestion, reorgs, or protocol behavior.
• Participate in architecture discussions and technical design reviews.
• Conduct code reviews and establish engineering and smart-contract security best practices.
• Collaborate with security engineers and external auditors during smart contract audits.
• Research emerging blockchain protocols, standards, security threats, and ecosystem developments.
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to engineering standards across the team.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial experience using Rust.
• Strong understanding of Rust fundamentals, including ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, traits, generics, concurrency, and asynchronous programming.
• Production experience developing smart contracts or blockchain programs.
• Strong understanding of blockchain fundamentals.
• Experience with at least one major smart-contract ecosystem, preferably Solana, or comparable experience with other blockchain platforms.
• Strong knowledge of common smart-contract vulnerabilities and secure development practices.
• Experience designing and consuming blockchain RPC APIs and SDKs.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous/event-driven architectures.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, and production software development practices.
• Ability to independently investigate complex blockchain and production issues.

Nice-to-Have

• Solana / Anchor
• EVM / Solidity
• Ethereum or EVM-compatible chains
• DeFi protocols
• DEXs and AMMs
• MPC or multisig wallets
• Custody infrastructure
• Account abstraction
• Cross-chain bridges
• Blockchain indexers
• Transaction simulation
• MEV and transaction ordering
• Cryptographic protocols
• Zero-knowledge technologies
• High-performance or low-latency systems

Benefits