Smart Contract Engineer

Category Labs (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to deliver significant improvements over existing blockchain solutions. After raising $225M in series A funding, led by Paradigm, we are growing our team.

We're the team behind Monad, a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 whose public mainnet is now live. We write the core software that runs it: a parallel-execution EVM, a custom state database, and a BFT consensus client, all developed in the open.

The Role:

Category Labs is looking for a Smart Contract Engineer to join the core engineering team to build at the application layer. The work can range from direct collaboration with external app and infrastructure teams to design and implementation of new primitives enabled by a high-performance EVM client. You'll be part of a small, high-functioning team in a fast-paced startup environment.

• You'll implement smart contracts that are well suited to the resources and throughput enabled by the Monad client built by Category Labs.
• You'll identify needs in the app developer ecosystem and address them through close collaboration with the core engineering team.
• You'll work directly with external application or infrastructure teams to unblock them with deep understanding of their domain AND the Category Labs client.

• You have at least 4 years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years of experience writing smart contracts in Solidity.
• You have prior experience in blockchain engineering at a Layer-1, Layer-2, or Infrastructure (Oracle, Bridge, Indexer, RPC Provider, Wallet, or other high-performance app) project.
• You are an expert with tools like Foundry and Hardhat and deeply understand security vulnerabilities at the application layer.
• You have backend engineering experience in low-level languages such as C, C++, or Rust.
• You have built something significant from scratch – preferably with users (the more, the better).
• You are a great communicator who is willing to participate in technical discussions, reviews, and documentation.
• You value the following qualities that define our engineering team: ability to DO things. When it comes to problem-solving, we value practicality and common sense.
• Strong design skills (e.g. higher-level thinking about system design, appropriate abstractions, maintainability).
• Excellence in whatever you have worked on before.
• Rigorous development mindset.

You'll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact. See our Blogs and Publications & Talks for a flavor of the problems we are solving in the real world.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard is ubiquitous, but existing EVM-compatible chains are very slow. Monads core innovations offer developers the best of both worlds (portability and performance) and are a game-changer for mass user adoption in crypto.

You'll be part of a small, exceptional team (engineers and researchers make up 90% of the team).

Our core software is public on Git Hub. You'll build in the open, and your work ships where the whole ecosystem can see it.

We're a lean team working together to achieve very ambitious goals. We are united in our culture of collaboration, low-ego, and high-quality output. As an early member of our team, you'll help to shape our culture.

You'll receive a competitive salary and equity package.

We're well-capitalized, with backing from leading venture funds like Paradigm, Electric Capital, Greenoaks, Dragonfly, and Coinbase Ventures. We keep a lean team, and this is a rare…