Founding Product Engineer

Witness

Our core mission at Witness is to make onchain ownership universal and accessible. Building out novel protocols, infrastructure and applications is our core focus  products and tools you build will be instrumental in not only scaling our internal capabilities, but also extending access to onchain ownership for developers globally.

We recently announced our new product - Paygo: a stablecoin payment rail purpose built for secure and fixed cost transactions. It utilizes novel advances in zero knowledge virtual machines to securely scale stablecoin access and utility. We are now focused on advancing this product and building user facing applications on top of it.

As an engineer at Witness, you'll play a critical role in building out our foundational infrastructure in a fast paced startup environment. This will involve researching, designing, and implementing novel engineering solutions related to hybrid onchain/offchain systems. You will ship a lot of code, with the potential to work on things like indexers, databases, smart contracts, cryptography, APIs and applications all operating at a global scale.

Our current technology stack spans the following tools and providers:

• Onchain:
  Solidity (deployed on Ethereum/EVM L2s) + Foundry
• Backend services:
  Rust + Typescript
• Frontend services:
  React + Tailwind
• Infra: railway.app and neon.tech

For the Founding Product Engineer role, we're looking for the following experience and qualifications:

• 4+ years of professional experience building and shipping production-grade web applications
• Deep expertise in modern frontend technologies such as:
• React/Next.js/Dioxus
• Type Script/Java Script
• UI frameworks (Tailwind CSS, Material UI, etc.)
• Crypto libraries such as Wagmi, Viem, Tevm
• Strong backend development capabilities in one or more of:
• Typescript/Node.js
• Rust
• Experience with:
• Database design and optimization
• API architecture
• Performance monitoring and optimization
• CI/CD pipelines
• AI-powered developer tools
• Key
  
  Qualifications:
• Proven track record of building and scaling user-facing products and applications
• Strong eye for design and attention to detail in UI/UX implementation
• Experience with high-performance, production-grade applications serving significant user bases
• Understanding of system design principles and scalability patterns
• Experience with modern development workflows and best practices

• A solid understanding of engineering principles. You enjoy building and shipping quality, resilient, and dependable services.
• A sense of grit to dive into a problem and own the implementation of solutions.
• Possess excellent communication skills for effectively conveying your perspective, ideas, problems, and solutions.
• A strong sense of ownership and autonomy while navigating the ambiguity of an early-stage startup.
• A motivation for accelerating the adoption of digital ownership beyond the current limitations of public blockchains.

We are an early-stage startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of other sizes and stages.

• We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well. Currently, our team consists of our 2 co-founders, Sina (CEO/CTO) and Joe (COO) and 1 founding engineers. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.
• We prioritize having a strong, in-person culture in San Francisco for our founding team. We are open to team members who operate remotely on a case-by-case basis.
• We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you'll have to be diligent and hold yourself accountable regarding the boundaries for your work day. Depending on your location, you may need to be flexible to accommodate the schedules of other team members and clients.
• We want teammates who own it. We strongly believe that empowering everyone on our team with ownership is a key to our growth and success. We expect every team member to not only own decision making, but also own the success or failure that results from their decisions.

At Witness, we provide best-in-class benefits including:

• Founding equity grants
• Great salaries
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits
• Annual offsites and conference travel stipends

Here's the entire process. Always feel free to ask us any questions as our interviews go both ways.

• We want to understand who you are, what you want to work on, and what your aspirations are. This conversation will be open ended so we can learn more about you and you can learn more about us.

• Implement a small project that will be communicated to you after our first call

• Pre-work (before your interview):
  Complete your project (advised)
• 0-5m:
  Introduction
• 5-50m:
  Building and expanding your project
• 50-60m:
  Questions on Witness/etc

• You'll meet with our co-founders and go over your project