Senior Backend Engineer, Rust
Arbitrum is a finance-native blockchain platform providing enterprise-grade infrastructure for applications, tokenization, and dedicated blockchain environments. It serves finance, consumer, and gaming applications, enabling developers and companies to build apps or launch their own chains with near-instant speed, low costs, and Ethereum-grade security.
About Arbitrum
Arbitrum positions itself as the enterprise-grade infrastructure for global finance, consumer, and gaming applications onchain. It offers a flexible platform allowing users to either build an app on Arbitrum One (using Solidity or Stylus, which supports Rust, C, and C++) or launch a fully customizable dedicated chain with configurable gas tokens, governance, access controls, and privacy. The platform emphasizes performance, confidentiality, customization, and compliance for institutional and blockchain-native developers alike. Arbitrum's ecosystem hosts hundreds of finance, consumer, and gaming applications, including major DeFi protocols like Aave, Pendle, GMX, Morpho, and Uniswap, as well as consumer and gaming projects such as The Beacon, Otherside, Wildcard, and Golden Tides. Clients and partners range from institutional finance players (e.g., Robinhood) to Web3-native consumer apps and game studios, reflecting its focus on serving both enterprise-grade finance use cases and mass-adoption consumer/gaming experiences.
Skills
About the Role
You'll join the Nitro team to help build the core technology powering Arbitrum, the leading Ethereum scaling solution. You'll work on Nitro, Arbitrum's node software, tackling challenges across execution engines, networking, state management, performance optimization, and reliability. You'll also contribute to Stylus, which allows smart contracts written in Rust and C/C++ to be compiled to WebAssembly and executed on Arbitrum alongside the EVM. This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll work closely with researchers, protocol engineers, and product teams to design, build, and operate systems used by developers and applications across the Arbitrum ecosystem.
Requirements
- Experienced Rust engineer with a track record of building production systems
- Comfortable working across distributed systems, infrastructure, and performance-critical applications
- Motivated by solving complex technical problems at scale
- Able to take ownership of projects from technical design through implementation and operation
- Pragmatic, collaborative, and capable of making sound engineering trade-offs
- Interested in runtimes, execution environments, WASM, developer tooling, and/or systems programming
- Maintained a security focused mindset, always keeping an eye out for potential threats and vulnerabilities in your code
- Experience with WASM (nice to have)
- Familiarity with blockchain infrastructure or smart contract platforms (nice to have)
- Open source contributions within the Rust ecosystem (nice to have)
Responsibilities
- Build and improve Nitro, the core node software that powers Arbitrum
- Design and optimize systems responsible for transaction execution, state management, and network performance
- Scale throughput and improve the performance and efficiency of Arbitrum's core infrastructure
- Solve distributed systems challenges across a large-scale blockchain network
- Enhance reliability, observability, and security across critical infrastructure
- Develop new capabilities for the Arbitrum stack
Benefits
- Remote-first global workforce + NY office
- Annual company offsite + team onsites
- Professional reimbursement program (facilitates industry conference attendance, certifications, and more)
- Medical, dental & vision coverage (US + some other countries)
- 401k retirement plan + company match (US only)
- Wellness stipend
- Home office set up / ergonomic equipment program