Protocol Engineer - Rockstar

Rockstar is recruiting for a foundation dedicated to supporting the growth, decentralization, and sustainability of a leading decentralized finance protocol. This client is committed to driving value in key focus areas such as Protocol and Innovation, Developers, Governance, Research, and Security through strategic grant-making.

The foundation is seeking a Protocol Engineer to join their technical team and contribute to the development of smart contracts for in-house projects, the protocol, Unichain, and grantee collaborations.

As a Protocol Engineer, the candidate will play a key role in designing, implementing, and optimizing smart contract systems. The role involves participating in technical design discussions, weighing trade-offs between optimization, flexibility, and integration, while also providing design feedback for ecosystem participants such as hook developers and Unichain DeFi projects.

What the Candidate Will Do:

• Design, implement, and optimize Solidity-based smart contracts for projects related to the protocol, focusing on security, efficiency, and maintainability.
• Provide technical guidance and design feedback for external developers building on the protocol and Unichain, including hook developers and DeFi projects.
• Explore and prototype new DeFi primitives, trading mechanisms, and smart contract architectures to expand the protocol’s capabilities.
• Participate in design sessions and code reviews, ensuring high standards in code quality, security, and organization.
• Implement unit tests, fuzz testing, and gas optimizations to ensure smart contract reliability and performance.

As a Protocol Engineer, the candidate may work on:

• Hooks and reference implementations for the protocol's latest version

- Experimental swapping UX designs

• Indexers and graph traversal algorithms

- Composable DeFi legos

- SDK abstractions and developer tooling

• Periphery integrations such as liquidity management tools and swap-and-add functionalities

What the Candidate Brings to the Table:

Required Skills & Experience:

• Strong understanding of DeFi patterns and smart contract architecture
• At least two years of experience writing complex Solidity smart contracts with an emphasis on readability, maintainability, and security
• Proficiency with Foundry, including cheatcodes, foundry.toml, and script execution
• Experience with unit testing and fuzz testing for smart contract security
• Confidence using Git and managing version control in a collaborative engineering environment
• Ability to design clean abstractions and reusable smart contract components
• Familiarity with the protocol's latest version contracts and related DeFi protocols