OPEN ROLE
Founding Blockchain + Smart Contract Engineer
San Fransisco/New York
View the interview process
About Axel
Axel builds developer infrastructure for the future of finance. We’re unlocking financial freedom for everyone, starting with the developer. As the leading universal and composable decentralized finance infrastructure platform, we’ve built the world class developer tooling needed to make building on the blockchain frictionless.
Developers and companies worldwide use Axel to build incredible applications and systems that leverage permissionless financial technologies — lending markets, yield protocols, staking, decentralized exchanges, and more. Our customers’ onboarding experience and home is through our web dashboard, where they use Axel to manage their API keys as well as instantiate, debug, monitor, and launch their apps.
Axel is extremely well funded from phenomenal investors and some of the brightest minds in technology, giving us many years of runway and the ability to provide significant equity, pay competitive salaries, and offer great benefits.
The Role
As one of our initial smart contract engineers, you will architect and build protocol infrastructure, proxy and interface contracts, open-source smart contract libraries, and more. You'll be responsible for bringing the same level of security, speed, and stability from our existing financial infrastructure platform to our smart contract infrastructure.
Build leading blockchain infrastructure. You’ll be building out Axel’s core smart contract adapters and proxy/interface contracts to support our API, as well as Axel’s public smart contract libraries.
Scope and lead complex technical projects. You’ll architect and design smart contracts with an emphasis on readability, security, performance, and scalability.
Set new standards for financial innovation. You’ll be driving standardization in crypto protocols by defining and designing seamless interfaces.
Maintain world class security. Build secure smart contract protocols and backend services to support Axel’s APIs and connect Axel’s developers with the decentralized finance ecosystem.
Play as a team. At Axel, engineering is a team sport. We believe a great team member is someone who does their best work, supports others, and loves giving and receiving feedback.
Lead by example. Develop and take ownership on best practices for EVM protocol upgrades and versioning across different networks. You will mentor other engineers in high leverage Solidity/EVM topics and best practices or pair program with other engineers day-to-day.
About you
You would be a good fit if you have:
2-4 years of backend development experience
1-2 years of Solidity smart contract development, including mainnet production deployments of non-trivial protocols and related security audits
Background in Computer Science or a technically related field
Proficiency with Solidity, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), browser wallet interfaces (e.g. MetaMask, Coinbase, etc.), and node RPCs (e.g. Geth, Erigon, Parity/OpenEthereum, etc.)
Experience designing, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining high traffic smart contracts
Experience with cutting edge developer tools, such as Hardhat, Foundry, Solmate, Huff, Ganache, and/or Truffle is preferred
Familiarity with the web3 frontend stack (ethers.js/web3.js, EIP-1193, client-side key management, browser security and common attack vectors, etc.) is preferred
Ability to balance shipping quickly with building secure, robust, scalable infrastructure
A “can-do” hustler mentality, being a former founder, or building side projects is a huge plus!
The Team
Our current team is focused primarily on engineering and design. We believe the magic happens when we’re in person. Our headquarters are based in Silicon Valley with a presence in New York.
If you want to be IRL with the team, we can help you relocate or fly you to the HQ on a regular basis.
We're a small, scrappy team, and we value building a thoughtful and intentional company culture.
Apply