Head of Protocol Engineering

Skills

About the Role

You will lead the technical architecture, execution, and operating standards for Compound's smart contract and protocol stack, reporting directly to the CTO. You'll move comfortably between system design, smart contract implementation, security analysis, engineering management, and high-stakes product decisions. You will partner closely with product, risk, security, and design leaders to define the protocol roadmap and build the team required to deliver it. You'll lead from the front, setting architectural direction, reviewing critical code, making difficult tradeoffs, developing exceptional engineers, and ensuring security and execution quality are never compromised.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including substantial experience leading teams that build complex distributed systems, financial infrastructure, or blockchain protocols
• 4+ years of experience in crypto, DeFi, smart contract engineering, protocol security, or closely related technical domains
• Demonstrated experience owning the architecture and delivery of production systems that manage meaningful financial value or operate in adversarial environments
• Deep expertise in Solidity, EVM architecture, smart contract security, upgradeability, protocol design, and production deployment practices
• Strong knowledge of DeFi primitives and risk mechanics, including lending markets, collateralization, liquidations, oracle design, liquidity management, and governance systems
• Proven experience hiring, coaching, and performance-managing engineers
• Strong product and business judgment
• Experience working with security researchers, audit firms, formal verification providers, and incident-response processes
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• A high degree of ownership, calmness under pressure, and willingness to make and defend difficult technical decisions
• Experience working on lending protocols, money markets, credit systems, liquidation engines, oracle systems, or risk infrastructure
• Prior experience collaborating with external auditors and remediating audit findings
• Familiarity with protocol governance, timelocks, multisigs, emergency controls, and secure deployment processes
• Experience with backend systems, indexing, APIs, data pipelines, or developer tooling that support onchain applications
• A demonstrated understanding of DeFi market structure, liquidity dynamics, and the operational realities of running live financial protocols

Responsibilities

• Own the technical architecture and engineering execution for Compound's protocol roadmap, from early design through mainnet deployment and post-launch iteration
• Represent Protocol Engineering in governance forums, community calls, technical AMAs, ecosystem events, and partner discussions
• Lead the design of modular lending and borrowing infrastructure, including liquidity architecture, collateral systems, market configuration, risk boundaries, liquidations, interest-rate mechanisms, accounting, and governance controls
• Define clear ownership boundaries between onchain and offchain systems
• Establish engineering standards for smart-contract development, testing, code review, audit engagement, formal verification, deployments, monitoring, incident response, and operational readiness
• Build, lead, and develop a world-class protocol engineering team
• Remain hands-on in critical architecture reviews, code paths, security decisions, audit remediation, and major protocol releases
• Partner with product and risk leadership to evaluate protocol tradeoffs and model failure scenarios
• Guide protocol changes through technical design, implementation, audit, testnet validation, governance review, deployment, and post-launch monitoring
• Serve as the senior technical counterpart to external auditors, security firms, infrastructure partners, integrators, and ecosystem contributors
• Review and challenge critical technical decisions to ensure systems remain understandable, maintainable, extensible, and secure at scale
• Build a culture of high ownership, rigorous execution, direct communication, and continuous improvement
• Lead protocol incident readiness, including emergency controls, response processes, postmortems, and long-term remediation
• Establish standards and guardrails for responsible use of AI-assisted development tools