Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Compound Foundation is seeking a Head of Protocol Engineering to lead the technical architecture and execution for their smart contract and protocol stack. This role involves overseeing the protocol roadmap, building a strong engineering team, and ensuring high standards of security and quality in all technical decisions.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical architecture and engineering execution for Compound’s protocol roadmap, from early design through mainnet deployment and post-launch iteration
- Represent Protocol Engineering in governance forums, community calls, technical AMAs, ecosystem events, and partner discussions, helping build confidence in Compound’s technical direction and execution
- Lead the design of modular lending and borrowing infrastructure, including liquidity architecture, collateral systems, market configuration, risk boundaries, liquidations, interest-rate mechanisms, accounting, and governance controls
- Define clear ownership boundaries between onchain and offchain systems, balancing decentralization, security, cost, performance, and operational flexibility
- Establish engineering standards for smart-contract development, testing, code review, audit engagement, formal verification where appropriate, deployments, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness
- Build, lead, and develop a world-class protocol engineering team with strong technical judgment, high ownership, and a security-first mindset
- Remain hands-on in critical architecture reviews, code paths, security decisions, audit remediation, and major protocol releases
- Partner with product and risk leadership to evaluate protocol tradeoffs, model failure scenarios, and ensure designs are economically, technically, and operationally sound
- Guide protocol changes through technical design, implementation, audit, testnet validation, governance review, deployment, and post-launch monitoring
- Serve as the senior technical counterpart to external auditors, security firms, infrastructure partners, integrators, and ecosystem contributors
- Review and challenge critical technical decisions, ensuring systems remain understandable, maintainable, extensible, and secure at scale
- Build a culture of high ownership, rigorous execution, direct communication, and continuous improvement
- Lead protocol incident readiness, including emergency controls, response processes, postmortems, and long-term remediation
- Establish practical standards and guardrails for responsible use of AI-assisted development tools, ensuring that speed gains never replace independent technical judgment, security review, testing, or code ownership
Skills
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience leading teams that build complex distributed systems, financial infrastructure, or blockchain protocols
- 4+ years of experience in crypto, DeFi, smart contract engineering, protocol security, or closely related technical domains
- Demonstrated experience owning the architecture and delivery of production systems that manage meaningful financial value or operate in adversarial environments
- Deep expertise in Solidity, EVM architecture, smart contract security, upgradeability, protocol design, and production deployment practices
- Strong knowledge of DeFi primitives and risk mechanics, including lending markets, collateralization, liquidations, oracle design, liquidity management, and governance systems
- Proven experience hiring, coaching, and performance-managing engineers, including setting clear expectations, developing technical leaders, and building high-performing teams
- Strong product and business judgment, with the ability to distinguish between technically interesting work and the work that most materially advances the protocol
- Experience working with security researchers, audit firms, formal verification providers, and incident-response processes
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs to executives, risk leaders, auditors, partners, governance participants, and community stakeholders
- A high degree of ownership, calmness under pressure, and willingness to make and defend difficult technical decisions
- Experience working on lending protocols, money markets, credit systems, liquidation engines, oracle systems, or risk infrastructure
- Prior experience collaborating with external auditors and remediating audit findings
- Familiarity with protocol governance, timelocks, multisigs, emergency controls, and secure deployment processes
- Experience with backend systems, indexing, APIs, data pipelines, or developer tooling that support onchain applications
- A demonstrated understanding of DeFi market structure, liquidity dynamics, and the operational realities of running live financial protocols
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