Founding Smart Contract Engineer

Founding Smart Contract Engineer

Location: United States, North America, Central America, South America

Reports to: Founders

Type: Full-time

Founding Smart Contract Engineer for an early-stage perpetual trading platform, taking ownership of smart contracts and progressively expanding across the wider onchain infrastructure.

Organisation Overview

Our client is an early-stage technology business building a perpetual trading platform and associated onchain infrastructure.

The organisation is developing a technically demanding product combining Solidity-based smart contracts with TypeScript services supporting indexing, transaction execution and wider chain integration.

The platform requires robust financial accounting, secure contract deployment and reliable interaction between onchain and offchain systems, creating an environment where engineering quality and correctness are fundamental to the product.

The Appointment

Our client is seeking a hands-on Founding Smart Contract Engineer to develop, maintain and progressively own the onchain components of its perpetual trading platform.

The initial focus will be ownership of the smart contract repository and contract release lifecycle, improving correctness, resolving bugs and delivering thoroughly tested upgrades. Over time, responsibility will expand into the indexer, relayer and other services that read from or write to the blockchain.

This is a mid-level individual contributor appointment requiring substantial practical experience with Solidity and EVM-based systems, together with the ability to independently deliver clearly scoped technical

changes.

The successful individual will work across Solidity and TypeScript and collaborate closely with application engineering, platform engineering and external auditors.

Key Responsibilities

·  Develop and maintain Solidity contracts covering collateral custody, positions, funding, liquidations, insurance funds, market settlement and related protocol functionality.

·  Maintain collateral solvency across available balances, reserved margin, withdrawal queues, fees and market escrow, reconciling contract state with offchain records.

·  Implement funding debt, receiver claims and settlement accounting while preserving financial obligations through partial fills, position changes and market closure.

·  Build Foundry regression, fuzz, invariant and fork tests covering collateral conservation, authorisation and settlement edge cases.

·  Prepare reviewed deployments, upgrades and patches, including storage layout checks, initializer safety, module dependencies, role configuration and fork-based migration rehearsals.

·  Maintain deployment scripts, verified sources and ABIs, coordinating compatible smart contract, indexer and relayer releases.

·  Investigate failed transactions and onchain incidents, validate remediation against contract state and work with auditors to address findings.

·  Build and maintain TypeScript services supporting contract reads, simulation, signing, transaction submission, receipt reconciliation, nonce management, RPC failure handling, reorg recovery and backfills.

Experience and Capability

·  Typically 3+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years building and maintaining Solidity contracts on EVM-compatible chains, or equivalent demonstrable shipped work.

·  Strong EVM fundamentals covering storage, external calls, delegatecall, revert behaviour, access control, reentrancy and gas costs.

·  Strong practical Foundry experience including Forge tests and scripts, Anvil, Cast, traces, stateful invariants, CI and gas or bytecode-size checks.

·  Hands-on experience with ERC-20 and vault accounting, including ERC-4626 asset and share conversions, rounding and inflation risks, collateral custody and withdrawal flows.

·  Experience working with signed fixed-point arithmetic, token decimals and rounding across PnL, funding, fees and liquidation calculations.

·  Experience maintaining upgradeable contracts using transparent proxies or UUPS, including initialization, storage compatibility and coordinated changes across contract modules.

·  Practical experience with EIP-712 signatures, domain separation, nonces, replay protection, delegated permissions, oracle validation and settlement states.

·  Production TypeScript and Node.js experience using technologies such as viem or ethers, together with SQL, queues, asynchronous execution and integration testing.

Leadership and Stakeholder Context

This is an individual contributor appointment with significant ownership rather than a people-management role. The successful individual will work closely with application engineering, platform engineering and auditors, taking responsibility for sensitive changes affecting funds and protocol behaviour while seeking appropriate peer review. Ownership is expected to grow from contract fixes and reviewed releases into primary responsibility for the indexer, relayer and wider onchain components, with shared decision-making around protocol economics.

About RecruitBlock

RecruitBlock supports organisations building specialist teams across crypto, Web3 and digital assets through crypto and Web3 recruitment.

RecruitBlock is a specialist Web3 and digital assets recruitment and executive search consultancy, with core expertise across Legal & Compliance, Finance, Growth and Leadership. We also provide compensation benchmarking, market intelligence and talent mapping across the wider crypto, Web3 and digital assets ecosystem.