Blockchain Protocol Engineer (Rust Developer)

Protocol Engineer

Altius is an early-stage, deeply technical infrastructure company building a high-performance blockchain stack tailored to handling high-frequency transactions. Our team's background is former HFT traders and fintech product builders.

The Protocol Engineer plays an integral role in designing, implementing and maintaining the Altius technology stack. This includes translating technical requirements into clean and robust code, optimizing algorithms and ensuring continuing scalability in both centralized and decentralized networks. This is a deeply technical role for engineers who think in systems, not services.

Altius is backed by Founders Fund & Pantera Capital.

Responsibilities

• Translate functional and technical specifications into high-performance code for blockchain nodes and decentralized systems
• Design, implement, and optimize core components of execution and networking systems in Rust
• Develop and maintain technical documentation for new features, system upgrades, and engineering processes
• Develop and test secure and compliant code, participating in required security and compliance testing processes; design and execute tests for correctness under failure and edge-case conditions
• Work with DevSecOps to maintain and improve deterministic CI/CD build and release systems
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in execution, networking, and system reliability
• Ensure correctness, security, and reproducibility of system behavior under production and adversarial conditions
• Maintain currency with EVM and other relevant blockchain ecosystems and implement new technical features as needed
• Debug complex distributed system behavior across execution and networking layers

Qualifications

• 4+ years of software engineering experience in production systems
• Strong Rust experience in systems or infrastructure contexts
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, concurrency, and low-level performance tradeoffs
• Experience with blockchain clients, execution layers, or consensus-adjacent systems
• Strong intuition for performance engineering (profiling, benchmarking, optimization)
• Familiarity with EVM internals or equivalent execution environments
• Ability to reason about system correctness, adversarial conditions, and edge-case behavior
• Experience working with Go is a plus
• Strong written communication for protocol design and technical documentation

Location : Remote North America/ LATAM (EST timezone) is preferred.