Senior Staff Software Engineer - Protocol

Sei Labs

Job Overview

Location

Remote

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Architect and ship the beating heart of the Sei Blockchain. You will own the consensus engine, state management, storage layer, and networking stack that allow Sei to process thousands of parallel EVM transactions per second—performance levels that rival Web2 clouds. Your code will be the foundation on which DeFi, gaming, and consumer apps onboard the next billion users.
• Turn cutting-edge research into production-grade systems. You’ll translate white-board sketches and academic papers into Rust or Go services that run reliably across a globally distributed validator set. Every optimization you land—whether it’s a new Merkle proof format, a smarter mempool admission policy, or a lock-free data structure—directly lowers latency and gas costs for end users.
• Proactively hunt for bottlenecks before users feel them. You will build deterministic benchmarks, flame-graph hot paths, and chaos-test networks to squeeze every last microsecond out of block production. When state bloat threatens throughput, you’ll design and champion pruning, snapshot, or sharding strategies that keep the chain lean without compromising security.
• Collaborate across the stack to deliver a seamless developer experience. You’ll pair with the frontend team to refine REST, gRPC, and WebSocket APIs so that wallets, indexers, and dApps receive consistent, low-latency data. You’ll also work with DevOps to package releases, automate rollbacks, and monitor canary deployments so upgrades feel invisible to validators.
• Lead with influence, not just authority. As a senior staff engineer you will set technical direction for multiple squads, write architecture decision records (ADRs), and mentor junior engineers through design reviews and pair programming. Your pull-request comments become the patterns the entire ecosystem copies.
• Champion security and correctness at scale. You will formalize threat models, spearhead fuzzing campaigns, and coordinate third-party audits. When edge-case bugs inevitably surface, you’ll orchestrate incident response, craft reproducible test cases, and ship patches that protect hundreds of millions of dollars in TVL.
• Shape the protocol’s roadmap. You’ll synthesize validator feedback, ecosystem analytics, and academic breakthroughs into quarterly OKRs. Whether the next milestone is parallel optimistic execution, stateless clients, or zk-EVM precompiles, your technical vision will decide what ships first and why.
• Contribute to open source and the broader Web3 community. You’ll publish post-mortems, speak at conferences, and shepherd improvement proposals (SEPs) through transparent governance. Your GitHub profile becomes a living résumé that attracts the best builders to Sei.

🎯 Requirements

• 5+ years of infrastructure or systems engineering experience in Rust, Go, C++, or equivalent low-level languages
• Demonstrated impact scaling Layer 1 blockchain performance—throughput, latency, or state growth—via consensus, execution, or storage optimizations
• Track record as a tech lead who has planned and delivered multi-month projects with long-term architectural consequences for a distributed system or team
• Deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus algorithms (Tendermint, HotStuff, Narwhal & Tusk), p2p networking, state synchronization, and cryptographic primitives
• Strong prioritization skills; able to balance security, performance, and shipping velocity under high-stakes conditions

🏖️ Benefits

• Fully remote-first culture with flexible hours and no location constraints
• Competitive compensation package including equity and token incentives
• Annual learning & conference budget to attend events like SREcon, ETHDenver, or RustConf
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents
• Home-office stipend and co-working allowance so you can build your ideal workspace

Skills & Technologies

REST

Senior

Remote

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Sei Labs

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About Sei Labs

Sei Labs is the core development team behind the Sei blockchain, an open-source Layer 1 optimized for high-frequency trading and real-time digital asset exchange. The company designs consensus mechanisms, order-matching engines, and developer tooling that deliver sub-second finality and high throughput for DeFi applications. Founded in 2022, it operates as a distributed research and engineering collective headquartered in San Francisco, maintaining the Sei protocol codebase, running open testnets, and supporting an ecosystem of validators, market makers, and application builders across Asia and North America.

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