Staff Engineer, Comet (Tech Lead)

Who we are

📌 Interchain Inc (formerly, Skip) leads development for the Cosmos Hub, ecosystem, and stack -- the leading platform for building sovereign, interoperable blockchains. We're dedicated to offering developers full-stack programmability, complete ownership of their economics, and best-in-class distribution to users everywhere.

Our mission is to build a more free, more fair internet with the Cosmos platform at the core. The best teams already build with Cosmos across every category: defi (dYdX, Osmosis, Injective), infrastructure (Babylon, Celestia, Initia), Depin/AI (Akash, Artificial Superintelligence Alliance, Allora), privacy (Nillion, Penumbra), and many more. We want to help these teams and many more help bring the values of sovereignty and decentralization to the rest of the internet by developing the Cosmos stack and hub. 

We focus on hiring the core team and senior talent to work together in person in NYC to build a collaborative and supportive culture. But we’re still open to hiring best-in-class remote talent anywhere within 6 hours of the NYC timezone.

Core team member responsibilities

1. Work to solve hard technical problems at the cutting edge of blockchain research alongside the founders.
2. Be empowered to make bold technical and strategic decisions.
3. Play a critical role in determining the people we hire, our culture, our engineering practices, and the products we ship.

How we work

1. We value ambition, work ethic, and m (slope) over prestige, accomplishments, and y-intercept.
2. We value thoughtful and contentious dialogue over siloed and unilateral decision-making.
3. We value acknowledging uncertainty/weakness and seeking support over unabated confidence and solo performances.
4. We’re obsessive about documenting everything, learning, and shipping as fast as possible with short feedback cycles. 

Description We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the development and optimization of CometBFT, the leading BFT consensus engine powering the Cosmos ecosystem.

The ideal candidate has expertise in distributed systems and consensus algorithms, with a proven ability to design scalable, high-performance systems. They are a strong technical leader who thrives on solving complex problems and guiding teams to deliver high-quality software. Someone who doesn’t enjoy building in public and interacting with their users won’t excel in this role. 

Role

• Lead the architecture, design, and development of core components in CometBFT 
• Troubleshoot and resolve critical issues in distributed systems with team members and customers
• Review and improve code contributions to establish and enforce engineering excellence across the codebase
• Mentor and support engineers to grow their technical expertise.

Qualifications

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Proven track record of leading technical projects and teams.
• Proficiency in Go or similar languages.
• Experience delivering reliable, production-grade systems at scale.
• Expertise in distributed systems algorithms.

Bonus:

• Familiarity with best practices for governance, decision-making, and development in open-source software
• Expertise in consensus algorithms or similar distributed systems research topics

Benefits

✈️ 18 days of paid leave

🧑‍⚕️ Premium health insurance

🏦 Competitive regional compensation and token compensation

📁 Office space and accommodations for remote work