We hire people who can say “that will not work, and here is why”.
A small team building settlement infrastructure that will move other people’s money. The work is unglamorous, heavily reviewed and written down. Nothing is on mainnet and nothing has been audited yet, so if you want to ship fast and apologise later, this is a bad fit and we would rather you found out here.
Five things that are true about this team
Written so you can disqualify us. Every one of these has a cost, and the cost is stated.
- Written first, meetings last. Every meaningful decision starts as a memo with the alternatives you rejected. We have four recurring meetings across the whole company. The cost: if you think out loud better than you write, you will find the first month slow.
- Review is heavy and it is not personal. Anything touching settlement, keys or policy needs two approvals, one from outside the author’s area. Reviews routinely take longer than the change. The cost: velocity on paper looks bad, and we have made peace with that.
- You are on call for what you ship. The person who wrote the service is on the escalation path for it, and postmortems will be blameless and public when there are any to write. The cost: it is a pager, and on a team this size the rotation is short.
- Async by default, deep timezone overlap not required. UTC−8 to UTC+3 today. We optimise for handoff quality rather than shared hours. The cost: decisions take a day longer than they would in one room.
- We publish what does not work. The security page lists what the protocol fails to protect against and states plainly that nothing has been audited; the status page publishes an empty incident log rather than a flattering one. You will be asked to write things like that. The cost: nowhere to hide a bad quarter, and no launch narrative to stand behind.
Bands are published, and we do not negotiate them
Same band for the same role regardless of where you live or how hard you push. Location adjustment is applied once, to the band, not to you individually.
The band on each role is the band. We make one offer, at the level the loop supports, and we explain the level.
Four-year vest, one-year cliff, ten-year exercise window. You keep the option if you leave; we are not going to make you fund a decision.
No office and no plans for one. Two week-long offsites a year, paid, and attendance is expected.
Private medical, dental and vision through a global provider, plus dependants. Where local statutory cover is better, we pay the top-up instead.
Plus local public holidays. The minimum is enforced by your manager, because unlimited policies quietly become zero.
Same for all parents, available from day one, and it does not reset your vesting or your review cycle.
Per year, no approval workflow. Conference travel is separate and approved by default if you are speaking.
On upstream dependencies we actually use. The output is public and it is part of your review.
No token allocation for employees — the bond and fee mechanics would put your incentives against the users’. No relocation package, because there is nowhere to relocate to. No unlimited holiday. No stock options priced on a valuation we cannot defend to you in the offer call.
Five steps, about three weeks, one paid take-home
No whiteboard algorithms and no culture-fit round. We ask what you built and what broke, then we look at how you work on something real.
Read by an engineer on the team, not a recruiter. Every applicant gets a reply, including a no.
≤ 5 working days45 minutes on something you built that had consequences. We will push on the parts that went wrong.
45 min · no prepA real problem from our backlog, scoped to four hours. Paid at $200/hour whatever the outcome.
4h cap · paidTwo engineers walk your submission with you. This is the round that decides, and it is a working session, not a test.
90 minBand, level and reasoning, in writing, within two working days. One number; we do not negotiate against another offer.
≤ 2 working daysTell us what you need and we will adjust the format — extra time, a different medium, a written round in place of a live one. It does not affect the assessment and it is not recorded anywhere.
You get the reason, specifically, in writing. Roughly one in five people we decline are asked to come back for a different role or a later cycle, and we say so at the time.
Six roles, all with published bands
Apply to whichever is closest and say in the write-up what you would rather be doing. At this size the role you are hired into and the role you end up owning are frequently not the same one, and we would rather you named the gap up front than discovered it in month three.
Read the code before you apply.
The contracts, the SDK and this website are public. The best applications we get reference something specific in them — usually something that is wrong.