Software Engineer

ABOUT THE COMPANY

• Proto is making the world's biggest macro themes directly tradable for the first time: data center growth, AI capex, GPU manufacturing, US foreign arms sales, as easy as trading on Robinhood. Private mainnet beta on Solana launching EOY 2026.

• We’re building a new market mechanism designed to improve how markets handle a broader range of market outcomes. Rather than re-using perpetual futures or traditional binary predictions, our approach enables more continuous price discovery through a novel market structure, creating a more efficient and intuitive trading experience while enabling 10-20x leverage.

• Built by a veteran ex-Phantom team (VP Product at Ondo, Quant Research at Citadel, experience leading teams at Google, Pinterest, Facebook, and Carta). We raised our seed round from a tier 1 crypto investor and Coinbase Ventures, with early angels including the founders of Phantom, Jito, Pendle, Goldsky, Meld, and SimpleHash.

Description

We're looking for a software engineer to own the backend and quantitative systems that power our prediction market products. This is a hands-on role for someone who can move between architecture, implementation, research, and production operations and who wants meaningful influence over both the product and the engineering organization.

What we're looking for

• The right mindset: high ownership, speed, pragmatism, and comfort operating with ambiguity

• Strong backend engineering and system design fundamentals

• Experience building reliable, scalable, data-intensive systems

• Quantitative or research-oriented ability, such as experience with trading systems, financial data, modeling, experimentation, or translating research ideas into production systems

• Experience with DeFi protocols and financial primitives, such as lending and borrowing markets, collateralized debt positions, stablecoins, automated market makers, liquid staking, restaking, real-world asset protocols, tokenized treasuries, or on-chain credit systems

• Strong ability to reason about, direct, and validate AI-assisted software development, with a focus on producing efficient, reliable, production-quality code

• 3+ years of full-time experience in web3/crypto development

• 4+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant roles at technology and product-driven companies.

Nice to haves

• Experience with trading infrastructure, market data, exchanges, risk systems, payment systems, or other correctness-critical financial software

• Experience with derivatives such as perpetuals, futures, options, CFDs, or prediction markets

• Experience designing systems in which settlement correctness and reconciliation are load-bearing

• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or protocol software

• Experience working closely with quantitative researchers

• Experience building protocols at scale ($10M+ TVL or 10k+ users)

• Multiple Solana programs shipped to mainnet, in Anchor and/or native Solana. You are fluent in the account model, PDAs, CPIs, compute budgets, and the actual pitfalls - account substitution, owner-check oversight, bump-seed canonicalization, CPI reentrancy, sysvar swaps, realloc edge cases

How we work

• Small, flat team with direct access to the founders

• High ownership and fast decisions

• Written reasoning and explicit technical tradeoffs

• AI-assisted development with human accountability

• A bias toward simple, observable, production-ready systems

What we offer

• A seat with substantial ownership of the technical architecture from day one

• Direct influence over the product, roadmap, and engineering culture

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity, calibrated to seniority and location

• The opportunity to build a technically ambitious financial system from its earliest stage

• Hybrid/remote options available, with team off-sites

• Small flat team, fast decisions

• Tax Planning Opportunities for maximizing QSBS Benefits

If you're interested:

1. Send us your resume.

2. Tell us something you built, or provide a short description of a production system you personally designed in 500 words or less.