Smart Contract Engineer

As a Smart Contract Engineer at Compound Foundation, you will build the next generation of lending and borrowing systems that power Compound. You work across protocol design, Solidity implementation, testing, security reviews, and production operations. This role focuses on building systems that safeguard user funds, operate under adversarial conditions, and remain understandable, upgradeable, and resilient over time. We have a preference for candidates with meaningful overlap across U.S. and European working hours.

What you'll do

• Design, implement, and maintain secure Solidity smart contracts for lending, borrowing, collateral, liquidation, risk controls, accounting, and protocol governance.
• Translate product, risk, and technical requirements into clear contract architecture and production-ready implementations.
• Build modular protocol components and developer tooling that make the system easier to extend, test, monitor, and integrate.
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, invariant, fuzz, and fork tests to identify edge cases before they reach production.
• Participate in architecture reviews, code reviews, audit preparation, and remediation of security findings.
• Model and simulate adversarial scenarios, including insolvencies, oracle failures, liquidation stress, permissioning failures, and upgrade risks.
• Work closely with product, risk, frontend, infrastructure, and external security partners to ship coherent end-to-end protocol capabilities.
• Improve engineering standards across documentation, deployment processes, monitoring, incident response, and operational runbooks.

What you bring

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years building EVM-based protocols or financial infrastructure using Solidity.
• Demonstrated experience designing, deploying, and maintaining production smart contracts on an EVM-compatible chain.
• Deep understanding of Solidity, the EVM, common smart contract vulnerabilities, upgrade and migration patterns, and secure contract design.
• Strong hands-on experience with Foundry or equivalent testing frameworks, including fuzzing and invariant testing.
• Experience building or contributing to DeFi protocols involving lending, borrowing, collateral, AMMs, vaults, liquidations, staking, or related financial primitives.
• Strong understanding of ERC standards and token interface conventions.
• Strong ability to reason about state machines, edge cases, numerical precision, access control, accounting invariants, and adversarial behavior.
• High standards for code quality, documentation, testing, and peer review.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, highly collaborative environment with significant individual ownership.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to effectively leverage AI-assisted development tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar to accelerate software development, debugging, testing, documentation, and code reviews while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, and engineering judgment.

Nice to have

• Experience working on lending protocols, money markets, credit systems, liquidation engines, oracle systems, or risk infrastructure.
• Prior experience collaborating with external auditors and remediating audit findings.
• Familiarity with protocol governance, timelocks, multisigs, emergency controls, and secure deployment processes.
• Experience with backend systems, indexing, APIs, data pipelines, or developer tooling that support onchain applications.
• A demonstrated understanding of DeFi market structure, liquidity dynamics, and the operational realities of running live financial protocols.

About Compound Foundation

Compound Foundation supports the development, adoption, and responsible growth of Compound, one of DeFi's original lending protocols with over $57B in loans processed. The foundation is now focused on Compound's next chapter: building Compound V4, the universal credit layer.