Senior Protocol Engineer

The role:

You’ll be a senior engineer on the UniFi stack, working across both its offchain infrastructure and onchain components.

You do not need prior experience with this exact stack. We hire for distributed-systems depth and proven ability to ramp fast on unfamiliar deep tech. If you’ve spent years in Ethereum L2s or L1 clients, wonderful, but the bar is ramp speed, not resume keywords. If your background is trading systems, consensus, or low-latency backend infrastructure and you can learn the Ethereum-specific parts quickly, we want to talk.

What you’ll build and own:

• The Engine (Rust): L2 and L1 preconfs (preconfirmations), parallel block building, and blocksapce configuration.
• Cross-chain settlement paths: vault contracts custodying capital on Ethereum L1, execution on the L2, and relayer services with confirmed-send semantics, serialized nonce management, and crash-restart recovery.
• On-chain infrastructure: Rollup Contracts and messaging between L1 and L2.
• Off-chain services in TypeScript (Node 20, viem): high-cadence pricers signing EIP-712 payloads, cross-chain relayers, risk monitors, keepers, and quoting bots, engineered for restarts, nonce races, and stale-data edges.
• TEE attestation infrastructure: hardware attestation verification (Intel TDX DCAP, AMD SEV-SNP) implemented in both Solidity and Rust, kept in lockstep by cross-language parity tests.
• ZK Proofs: Zero knowledge proofs
• The test surface that keeps it honest: Foundry fuzz and invariant suites, adversarial regression tests, and live-testnet E2E harnesses.

You’ll pick a primary layer; you’re expected to read across all of them.

How we work:

• Security is built into the process: External audits, invariant gates in CI, and honest internal tracking of what’s production-grade versus simulated.
• Ship to a live network: We deploy continuously. Your work can be running in production within days, not quarters, and is read by client-team and rollup-stack peers, not just your standup.
• Small, senior team: Direct ownership, written decision-making (ADRs), and minimal process overhead.

What we offer:

• Competitive compensation: Salary + token/equity.

Remote-friendly: Work from where you’re most effective, with flexibility across time zones.

• Meaningful ownership: Join a small, senior team where your work directly shapes the product, architecture, and network.
• High-impact work: Build infrastructure that ships to a live network and is used in production, not prototypes that sit on a roadmap.
• Room to grow: Take ownership beyond your initial scope as the team and network scale.
• Low bureaucracy: Direct access to the team, fast decisions, and minimal organizational overhead.

How to apply:

Email [email protected] with:

• Your GitHub username and the hardest system you’ve built, a repo, design doc, or postmortem; and
• 3–5 sentences on the nastiest failure mode you’ve personally debugged in a distributed system.

We read code before CVs. We reply to every application that includes both. But do include your resume as a PDF. No cover letter needed. Our docs are public at http://docs.puffer.fi. We’d rather you read them and show up skeptical than judge us by this posting.

About Puffer & Puffer UniFi

Puffer builds Ethereum-native infrastructure: the pufETH liquid restaking protocol, the UniFi based rollup, and the UniFi Preconf. UniFi is an OP-Stack rollup sequenced by Ethereum’s own validators, pairing L1-grade neutrality with real-time UX: sub-10ms execution preconfirmations backed by restaked ETH, ~10-second withdrawals via a TEE multi-prover (Intel TDX + AMD SEV) instead of a 7-day dispute window, and same-slot L1⇔L2 composability through the Signal Service. Sequencing value flows back to Ethereum, not to us.

We’re backed by Brevan Howard Digital, Electric Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Yzi Labs, Kraken Ventures, Franklin Templeton, and F-Prime (Fidelity), plus grants from the Ethereum Foundation and EigenLayer.

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