Director of Engineering
Nexus is developing a Layer 1 blockchain designed to function as a 'world supercomputer' for the AI era. By leveraging a zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM), Nexus aims to provide a high-performance, scalable, and verifiable compute platform. Users can contribute their device's idle compute power to the network and earn rewards, facilitating mass adoption. The project is focused on building infrastructure for autonomous applications and agentic intelligence.
Funding
Investors
Projects
About Nexus Laboratories, Inc.
Nexus is a technology company building infrastructure for the AI era. Their core products include the Nexus Layer 1, a 100% EVM-compatible blockchain designed to function as a world supercomputer by concentrating global compute power. This is powered by the Nexus zkVM, a general-purpose virtual machine that enables fast, verifiable compute at a large scale, compatible with languages like Rust, Go, and C++. Nexus also operates the Nexus Verifiable AI Lab, an R&D division focused on the intersection of AI and zero-knowledge proofs, exploring areas like verifiable AI, AI for verification, economic AI agents, and AI-driven economic systems. They encourage participation through their Testnet, where users can contribute their device's idle compute power to earn rewards and help build the network. Nexus targets developers, researchers, validators, and collaborators looking to build autonomous applications and agentic intelligence on their platform.
Skills
About the Role
You will own the engineering of the Nexus Exchange end-to-end — the matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing and storage, the API/CLI/SDK surfaces, the oracle, and the infrastructure that runs it all. This is a money-handling domain where correctness, throughput, and tail latency are non-negotiable, and where breadth across many subsystems is the job. You'll set direction and stay hands-on in the highest-leverage code. This role anchors the Exchange Infrastructure specialization while carrying the full org-wide Head of Engineering mandate: you'll own the architecture, lead the org, drive product and business outcomes, and make the team the most productive it can possibly be. We're open to both experienced engineering leaders and rising leaders with outsized leadership ambition and the trajectory to back it.
Requirements
- 8+ years building production software, including 2+ years in an engineering leadership capacity (tech lead / staff / principal / architect across multiple teams)
- Proven high-throughput, low-latency systems experience and strong command of concurrent/parallel systems
- Deep hands-on stack fluency: Rust, Go, Next.js/TS or Node, GCP
- Architecture chops with sound correctness / latency / throughput / operability trade-offs
- Business-minded and outcome-driven
- Resilient and logical — clear-headed under pressure, reasons from first principles
- AI-forward: excited to use the latest AI tools and to push automation across the org
- Has mentored senior engineers and grown tech leads
- Fluent written and spoken English; async-first with meaningful US Pacific overlap
- Exchange-specific: deep exchange / trading-systems or comparable transaction-processing architecture; matching / risk / settlement correctness; market data (indexing, cold storage); API / SDK / CLI surfaces; oracle design
Responsibilities
- Own architecture across the Exchange domain and stay hands-on writing production code in the highest-leverage parts of the system
- Build the full Exchange and all its sub-components: matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing, cold data storage, API / CLI / SDK, oracle, and the underlying infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform)
- Lead the engineering org — senior engineers plus pods — managing timelines, roadmaps, and resourcing
- Drive product and customer outcomes, business-minded first; drive urgency and high-frequency iteration
- Make the org the most productive and efficient it can be
- Own end-to-end automation of engineering processes: agent infrastructure, logging, telemetry, observability
- Design team structures and incentives with the CEO and exec team
- Manage an international, distributed workforce
- Drive quality infrastructure — telemetry, observability, and thorough automated testing (e2e, property, fuzz, invariants) — and set the bar for code review, on-call, and incident response
- Grow ICs and tech leads
- Communicate via design docs, RFCs, and post-mortems