Head of Protocol Engineering
Compound Finance operates decentralized markets for earning yield, accessing liquidity, and borrowing against digital assets. Its services support deposits, lending, and overcollateralized borrowing through the Compound protocol.
Maintainer signals as of 8/12/2026
About Compound Foundation
Compound Finance provides secure, audited markets where users can deposit digital assets to earn market-driven yield or borrow against excess collateral. The platform offers liquidity across assets including ETH, WBTC, and stablecoins, with instant withdrawals or borrowing subject to available liquidity. Compound also supports protocol security, governance, ecosystem development, risk and capital management, engineering, partnerships, and community engagement.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will lead the architecture, execution, and operating standards for Compound’s smart-contract and protocol stack. Set technical direction, review critical code, lead protocol releases, build the engineering team, manage security and audit processes, and guide 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
- Distributed systems
- Financial infrastructure or blockchain protocols
- Production systems handling financial value
- Solidity
- EVM architecture
- Smart-contract security
- Upgradeability
- Protocol design
- Production deployment
- DeFi primitives
- Lending markets
- Collateralization
- Liquidations
- Oracle design
- Liquidity management
- Governance systems
- Engineering leadership
- Hiring and coaching
- Performance management
- Security audits
- Incident response
- Technical communication
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
