Senior Security Engineer, DeFi
What security roles in crypto pay
73 salaries · our own dataMost security roles in crypto pay between $145k and $268k, with a median of $200k.
As a Senior Security Engineer at Mysten Labs, you'll protect the Sui ecosystem by uncovering vulnerabilities, building monitoring tools, and assessing economic risk across DeFi protocols. Working closely with external protocol teams and Mysten's own DeFi products including DeepBook, you'll help address risks before they become incidents and strengthen security across the ecosystem.
What you'll do
- Build and run continuous monitoring of the Sui DeFi ecosystem for security and economic risk, including oracle issues, misconfigurations and bad economic parameters, solvency and bad-debt exposure under price shocks, liquidation capacity against on-chain liquidity depth, accounting-versus-positions reconciliation, and invariants.
- Extend security team tooling, including precise static analysis tooling and proprietary agent skills.
- Measure and drive compliance with DeFi security recommendations across supported protocols by running the recurring compliance cycle, filling the protocol report card, validating security claims against on-chain reality, tracking remediation commitments, and escalating when a protocol regresses or fails to disclose an incident.
- Hunt for critical vulnerabilities in the highest-TVL Sui protocols and get them fixed before they are exploited, including full-package audits, variant analysis across forks, pre-execution review of multisig upgrade payloads, and forensics after incidents.
- Serve as the security team's point of contact for external DeFi teams and Mysten's own DeFi products such as DeepBook, handling due diligence, incident coordination, and post-mortems that feed back into recommendations and monitors.
- Document findings, reports, and runbooks that a protocol engineer can act on and a non-technical stakeholder can understand, with every claim traceable to bytecode, chain state, or data.
What you bring
- A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in security engineering, smart contract security, or DeFi risk engineering, with a track record of building tools that ran in production and finding real vulnerabilities through audit findings, bug bounty reports, published research, or incident work.
- A strong understanding of DeFi mechanics and their failure modes, including lending markets (LTV, liquidation thresholds and bonuses, close factors, bad debt), AMMs and concentrated liquidity, perpetuals, liquid staking, oracles (staleness, confidence, TWAP, multi-source aggregation), flash loans, and MEV.
- Proficiency in TypeScript and Python, comfort with Rust, ability to write SQL over large datasets, and experience working with blockchain indexers and data warehouses.
- Experience reading smart contract code at source or the bytecode or disassembly level, or evident ability to learn it quickly. Move experience is a plus; Solidity or Rust smart contract experience transfers.
- Rigor in verifying claims against bytecode and chain state, building known-clean checks into your tools, and clearly stating what you did not verify.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence external teams you have no formal authority over.
- Interest in the web3 space.
Nice to have
- Sui and Move experience, including the object and capability model, package upgrades and version gates, programmable transaction blocks, and the Sui GraphQL and gRPC APIs.
- Knowledge of recent DeFi exploit history on Sui and other chains, including named incidents, oracle compromises, and the defect classes behind them.
- Experience building analysis or monitoring tools with LLM agents such as Claude Code, with a clear sense of where models help and where deterministic tooling must do the work.
- Static or dynamic program analysis experience, including taint analysis, call graphs, symbolic execution, fuzzing, and formal verification.
- Quantitative or economic modeling experience, including stress testing, liquidity modeling, and risk parameters for lending markets.
- Publications, conference talks, CVEs, or bug bounty rankings.
About Mysten Labs
Mysten Labs builds foundational infrastructure to accelerate the adoption of decentralized protocols based on blockchain technologies. The company raised a $300M Series B led by Jump Crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, and other top Silicon Valley venture funds, and operates a remote-first team hiring across the world.
