Head of Protocol Engineering

Skills

About the Role

Lead the technical architecture, execution, and operating standards for Compound’s smart-contract and protocol stack, including technical direction, critical code review, protocol releases, engineering team development, security, audits, and high-stakes technical and product decisions.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience
• 4+ years of crypto, DeFi, smart-contract engineering, protocol security, or related experience
• Experience with distributed systems, financial infrastructure, or blockchain protocols
• Experience owning 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
• Knowledge of DeFi primitives, lending markets, collateralization, liquidations, oracle design, liquidity management, and governance systems
• Experience hiring, coaching, and performance-managing engineers
• Strong product and business judgment
• Experience with security researchers, audit firms, formal verification providers, and incident-response processes
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• High ownership, calmness under pressure, and willingness to make difficult technical decisions
• Experience with lending protocols, money markets, credit systems, liquidation engines, oracle systems, or risk infrastructure
• Familiarity with protocol governance, timelocks, multisigs, emergency controls, and secure deployment processes
• Experience with backend systems, indexing, APIs, data pipelines, or developer tooling supporting onchain applications
• Understanding of DeFi market structure, liquidity dynamics, and live financial protocol operations

Responsibilities

• Own protocol architecture and engineering execution
• Represent Protocol Engineering in governance forums, community calls, technical AMAs, events, and partner discussions
• Lead the design of lending and borrowing infrastructure
• Define on-chain and off-chain system boundaries
• Establish standards for development, testing, review, audits, verification, deployment, monitoring, and incident response
• Build and develop the protocol engineering team
• Review critical architecture, code, security decisions, and releases
• Evaluate protocol tradeoffs and failure scenarios with product and risk leadership
• Guide protocol changes through design, implementation, audit, validation, governance, deployment, and monitoring
• Coordinate with auditors, security firms, infrastructure partners, and ecosystem contributors
• Lead protocol incident readiness and remediation
• Establish guardrails for AI-assisted development tools