Senior Researcher

Babylon is looking for a Senior Researcher.

Babylon is a blockchain infrastructure startup founded by David Tse of Stanford and Fisher Yu, and backed by a16z, Paradigm, Polychain, and other leading investors. Babylon’s vision is to enable the trillion‑dollar Bitcoin asset to be used trustlessly in the DeFi economy.

Babylon invented Bitcoin staking, now a live protocol with over $4 billion in BTC staked. The team is currently focused on building trustless Bitcoin vaults, enabling native Bitcoin to be used as collateral in DeFi protocols such as Aave, without wrapping or bridging. This work is powered by BABE (CCS 2026), a proof‑verification protocol for Bitcoin based on witness encryption and garbled circuits, achieving a 1000× cost reduction over the state of the art.

The ideal candidate has a Ph.D. in distributed consensus, cryptographic protocols, or a related area, and a strong interest in doing impactful research in the blockchain space. In this role, the Senior Researcher will work closely with Babylon’s engineering team as well as external research collaborators at a16z, Common Prefix and leading universities.

Our team is remote‑first and we are hiring across the world.

Interested candidates are welcome to reach out to Nikhil Vanjani at nikhil or David Tse at dntse
.