Protocol Engineer

Protocol Engineer

Serokell is a fully remote software development company working on technically ambitious projects across areas like programming languages, blockchain infrastructure, fintech, biotech, and AI. We care about strong engineering, thoughtful collaboration, and solving complex problems with depth rather than hype.

We review applications on a rolling basis. Start date depends on current project needs and mutual fit. If your profile is a strong match, we will contact you with next steps.

About the Role

We are looking for a Protocol Engineer to join our team and work on blockchain infrastructure and protocol-level components.

This role is aimed at engineers with real hands-on experience in core blockchain development, not only application-level work. We are looking for someone who understands how blockchain systems operate under the hood and has contributed to the architecture, implementation, or improvement of essential protocol components.

You may be a strong fit if you have worked on nodes, validators, clients, execution or validation logic, synchronization, networking, storage, or other parts of blockchain infrastructure. We are especially interested in people who combine solid systems thinking with a practical engineering mindset and care about reliability, maintainability, and performance.

Hiring Process Overview

The first step is a short questionnaire. Next, we invite matching candidates to an HR screening. Then we conduct a technical interview with those whose profiles align with our requirements. Successful candidates will receive an offer. In rare cases, there may be an additional short call with a project lead.

Requirements:

• Commercial experience in core blockchain development.
• Strong understanding of blockchain internals, such as consensus mechanisms, transaction lifecycle, mempool, block production and validation, P2P networking.
• Knowledge of cryptography fundamentals, including hashing, signatures, Merkle trees, and public/private key systems.
• Solid knowledge of distributed systems, concurrency, and performance-oriented backend development.
• Experience developing or maintaining protocol-level components, nodes, clients, validators, or other blockchain infrastructure.
• Experience with at least one system-level programming language such as Rust, Haskell, Go, C++, etc.

General Requirements:

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong grasp of computer science fundamentals, algorithms and data structures.
• Ability to work independently in a fully remote environment.
• Readiness to participate in code reviews and technical discussions.
• Care for code quality, reliability, and maintainability.
• Fluent spoken and written English.

Will be a plus if you have:

• Experience with peer-to-peer networking and low-level protocol design.
• Experience optimizing performance, throughput, or latency in distributed systems.
• Familiarity with smart contract platforms and virtual machine internals.
• Experience contributing to open-source blockchain projects.

Responsibilities:

• Develop robust, scalable, and maintainable blockchain infrastructure and protocol-level components.
• Work on the implementation and improvement of core blockchain logic, including networking, validation, execution, synchronization, storage, or consensus-related systems.
• Participate in architecture discussions and help make technical decisions for complex distributed systems.
• Debug and resolve technical issues, identify bottlenecks, and implement effective solutions.
• Write tests, review code, and contribute to high engineering standards across the project.
• Collaborate closely with other engineers in a remote international team.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary.
• Attractive international projects.
• Participation in the leading world conferences.
• International teams and multicultural environment.
• Fully remote work and flexible working hours.
• Possibility to take days off whenever you need.
• Investment in your professional and career growth, which will correspond to wage growth.
• Mentoring and training.
• Therapy sessions to support your well-being.
• Opportunity to contribute to one of the functional programming industry's leading blogs.

By joining Serokell, you will become part of a remote international team of engineers, researchers, designers, and other thoughtful people who care about building difficult things well. You will have the chance to work on meaningful technical challenges, contribute to long-term engineering decisions, and grow in an environment that values curiosity, autonomy, and strong technical standards.