Rockstar is recruiting for a leading organization dedicated to advancing decentralized finance (DeFi) through innovative protocol engineering and product design. The client is a mission-driven foundation supporting the growth, decentralization, and sustainability of the Uniswap ecosystem, with a focus on driving value across protocol innovation, developer support, governance, research, and security. This role offers the opportunity to work at the forefront of DeFi, collaborating with a team committed to building impactful, open financial infrastructure.
v4 Hooks Architect
A senior builder is sought who operates at the intersection of protocol engineering and DeFi product design. This individual will design, prototype, and productionize Uniswap v4 hooks that unlock new markets. Areas of focus include dynamic fee markets, JIT‑aware liquidity protections, programmable compliance for RWAs, solver/intents integrations, perps/credit primitives, and beyond.
Why this role exists
- Hooks are the frontier. Uniswap v4 turns AMM behavior into a programmable surface. The ecosystem needs more production-ready hooks to go from tinkering to real usage.
- Builders need partners. High‑quality hooks require deep protocol knowledge and product instincts designing the onchain mechanics, the incentives, and a path to distribution.
- The mandate: accelerate onchain trading activity and protocol support across Uniswap deployments. This role is central to that impact.
The work
- Bring product thinking for market‑tailored hooks: Ideate/incubate high‑leverage ideas across market segments: volatile pairs (ETH/USDx, xBTC/USDx), correlated/stable pairs (USDx–USDx), and order sizes from small retail to whales. Translate these insights into concrete hook specs with clear adoption and measurement plans.
- Architect & ship hooks: Own the full lifecycle from whiteboard to an audited mainnet deployment that advances the roadmap (fee dynamics, liquidity management, MEV/LVR capture, KYC/attestations, JIT, etc.).
- Author canonical patterns: Publish reference implementations, hook templates, and “living specs” that other teams can safely extend.
- Design with distribution in mind: Co‑create adoption plans with other DeFi protocols (lending/ALMs/vaults), aggregators/routers, intent layers, asset issuers. Ship the adapters, simulators, and SDK glue to make integration easy.
- Own security & correctness: Threat model hooks, define invariants, fuzz and formally verify critical paths, and partner with external auditors.
- Data & feedback loops: Work with the data team to instrument events/metrics, write Dune/Flipside dashboards, and run controlled experiments to tune parameters (fees, tick ranges, JIT thresholds) based on observed flow, MEV, and LP PnL.
A week in this role might look like