Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Low Latency C++

Monad Labs is a venture-backed startup building the Monad blockchain, a high-performance smart contract platform built to bring world adoption to decentralized apps. Monad delivers 1000x the throughput of Ethereum—10,000 transactions per second—while maintaining backward-compatibility for Ethereum smart contracts, offering users and developers the best of both worlds.

Founded by Jump Trading alums, our team solves challenging problems in distributed systems engineering and low-latency optimization, authoring novel open source code to implement a new, high-performance, high-reliability, high-value system.

After recently raising a $19 million seed round backed by Dragonfly Capital, Placeholder Capital, Naval Ravikant, and other leaders in the crypto space, we are hiring a few more exceptional engineers who want to work on challenging and impactful problems in a fast-paced environment.

The Role

We are looking for strong software engineers with deep experience in low-level systems engineering and performance optimization.

The Monad blockchain consists of a stack-based virtual machine for executing on-chain programs, and a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism for maintaining consistent state across distributed network. You’ll use your knowledge of systems behavior and architecture to make performance and feature improvements to the blockchain system.

You’ll be part of a lean, focused team shipping a massively impactful system. You’ll design new features and identify optimizations that advance the system’s limits. We think that you'll find the work very challenging and rewarding. Experience with crypto is not expected.

Who you are

Requirements:

• You have a Computer Science degree, or equivalent experience
• You’ve worked on challenging software projects where you had to write a lot of code
• You're an expert in C++ with excellent knowledge of lower-level details like memory management and multithreading
• You have excellent instincts for software architecture
• You're resourceful and able to work fairly independently
• You value communication and collaboration
• You're interested in building high-value systems
• You’re excited about working in a startup, where you’ll wear many hats and handle uncertain requirements

Bonus:

• Experience with kernel development
• Experience with fault-tolerant distributed systems
• Experience with database development, compiler optimization, applied cryptography, or networking
• Contributions to open source projects
• Startup experience
• Interest in crypto

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building a high-performance multithreaded stack-based VM, as well as ancillary functionality (storage, RPC)
• Designing and building a distributed system kept in sync by a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism
• Designing and building VM features that allow developers to build more powerful programs on the Monad platform
• Identifying bottlenecks through profiling, and evaluating design choices for accelerating computation flow
• Contributing to developer tooling
• Tech stack: C++, rust, clang, LLVM, gdb, perf, unix, git

Why work with us

Working at Monad Labs means doing challenging work on a high-impact problem with exceptional teammates.

Here are some of the people you’ll work with:

• James, performance engineering expert and system architect; previously designed and built ultra-low-latency systems for a top high-frequency trading team at Jump Trading;
• Ariq, expert at low-level firmware and software programming; previously a senior engineer at Arista Networks, where he served as lead maintainer on multiple linux kernel networking drivers for Arista EOS devices;
• Aashish, expert systems designer and hacker, previously the first engineer at Pattern Research, a leading crypto HFT firm, where he designed and built the entire trading stack from scratch; MIT graduate at age 19

Why work with us?

• You’ll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact
• You’ll work with and learn from a small, exceptional team
• You’ll receive a competitive salary, along with equity
• You’ll shape the culture as an early employee and make impactful contributions from day one
• You’ll be part of a flat, results-driven organization
• Your work will be deeply impactful, enabling much cheaper and more efficient decentralized computation and ultimately paving the way for new dapps that improve many people’s lives.

We think you’ll enjoy working with us, and that you’ll find the work to be extremely impactful and challenging.

Salary and benefits

Minimum full-time salary of $250,000. (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary; a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.)

Monad Labs’ benefits include unlimited and encouraged paid time off; insurance coverage; home office equipment stipend; monthly wellness/fitness stipend; and 10 company-observed holidays.

The majority of our team is in NYC and works together a few days a week.