Senior Smart Contract Engineer

About us

Aave Labs began with a simple question: how do we make financial services like borrowing, saving, and earning more accessible globally?

We built the Aave Protocol, now the world’s largest and most trusted onchain lending market, connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech.

Today, we build trusted, high-quality products that expand access to lending, credit, and savings globally

Our culture

We build trusted products that help people access and discover economic opportunities.

We hold a high bar for quality and craftsmanship. No detail is too small. Trust depends on it.

We’re a global team building products people can actually use, turning complex technology into something simple and reliable.

We stay aligned, move quickly, and think long term, while keeping teams lean and focused on impact.

About the role:

Aave Labs is looking for a Senior Smart Contract Engineer to help build and evolve the Aave Protocol and GHO stablecoin. You should have a strong passion for web3 technology and a deep understanding of smart contract development.

In this role, you'll design, implement, test, and deploy smart contracts across Ethereum and other EVM-based networks. You'll independently own small to medium-sized projects and contribute to larger protocol initiatives, working closely with the wider Aave engineering team to build secure and reliable DeFi infrastructure.

• Design, implement, and test secure Solidity-based smart contracts and decentralised applications
• Own small to medium-sized smart contract projects end to end, such as building adapters and integrations, from technical design through implementation, testing, and deployment
• Contribute to larger protocol initiatives, such as Aave V4, vaults, and GHO, working within established architecture
• Contribute to the development and maintenance of protocol-level infrastructure and tooling
• Collaborate with engineers and cross-functional teams to design and ship new protocol features and functionality
• Investigate security vulnerabilities, reproduce potential attack scenarios, and contribute to mitigation and response
• Debug and troubleshoot smart contract and protocol issues across development and production environments
• Review code written by other engineers, providing constructive feedback with a strong focus on correctness, testing, and security
• Stay up to date with developments across Ethereum, DeFi, and smart contract security, applying relevant learnings to your work

• Strong experience building and shipping production smart contracts using Solidity
• Experience working with DeFi protocols and a strong understanding of smart contracts, the EVM, and common protocol design patterns
• The ability to independently design and deliver well-defined smart contract projects of limited scope, identifying technical requirements, trade-offs, and potential risks
• Deep technical expertise in one or more areas of DeFi, such as lending, vaults, stablecoins, liquidity, or protocol integrations.
• Strong knowledge of smart contract security, including common vulnerability classes, testing methodologies, and secure development practices
• The ability to make sound technical decisions within your area of expertise and clearly explain the reasoning and trade-offs behind your approach
• A track record of producing reliable, well-tested code and providing useful technical feedback through code review
• A habit of keeping up with the latest exploits, security research, tooling, and developments across the Ethereum ecosystem
• A genuine passion for DeFi and building at the forefront of web3 technology

• Experience building or integrating DeFi vaults, including areas such as share and NAV accounting, strategy allocation, and deposit and redemption flows
• Experience contributing to large, complex DeFi protocols or smart contract codebases
• Experience building protocol adapters or integrating external protocols and infrastructure

Haven’t quite met all the criteria? Let’s not miss out on the chance to speak. Whilst you might not meet every single requirement, you might bring other, more exciting skills to the companies!

Equal opportunities statement:

Aave Labs celebrates diversity and views each and every team member as a separate individual with their own unique identity. No matter your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation or even the wallet you use, we welcome you at Aave Labs. As an equal opportunities employer, we take accountability and believe in everyone's potential to build, create and inspire changes. With a mission to build a diverse workforce, we are proud to foster a working environment in which everyone can feel safe and valued for who they are.