We’re looking for an exceptional Protocol Engineer to help us push the frontier of blockchain interoperability. You’ll focus on the on‑chain layer of the Metalayer—Caldera’s high‑performance, stack‑agnostic bridge that already serves 75+ rollups and their users.
Your day‑to‑day will involve architecting and hardening smart contracts that move real value across chains, designing security‑critical role and upgrade patterns, and collaborating with audit partners to ship code that can safely secure hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is the perfect role for an engineer who has shipped high‑TVL protocols and thrives on digging deep into EVM/SVM internals, gas economics, and cross‑chain message‑passing. If you want to see your work deployed to dozens of chains and used by thousands of developers, we’d love to meet you.
We’re backed by leading crypto investors (Founders Fund, Dragonfly, and Sequoia), offer competitive cash + token, and provide full benefits.
About CalderaCaldera builds infrastructure that lets the most ambitious Web3 apps launch ultra‑performant rollups instead of competing for block space on congested general‑purpose chains. Our software powers dynamic, scalable blockchain experiences for millions of users. We’re a distributed team with hubs in San Francisco and New York, and we support both in‑office and remote work.
As a Protocol Engineer at Caldera, you willDesign & implement Solidity and Rust smart contracts across EVM, L2s, and SVM that form the core Metalayer protocol.
Own on‑chain security—role‑based access control, pause/upgrade paths, and high‑value asset protections.
Drive audits: spec, coordinate, and remediate findings with top security firms.
Collaborate with relayer, indexer, and frontend teams to define clear, developer‑friendly on‑chain APIs.
Build tooling for on‑chain monitoring, alerting, and gas/performance profiling.
Research & prototype new protocol features (e.g., fast‑finality bridges, ZK‑verified proofs) that expand Metalayer’s surface area.
Have 3+ years engineering experience, including shipping production protocols with significant TVL.
Possess expert‑level Solidity and/or Rust skills and a deep grasp of EVM/SVM internals.
Understand gas/compute metering on Ethereum, L2s, and Solana, and how off‑chain components (relayers, indexers) interact with contracts.
Are comfortable owning end‑to‑end security: access control, upgradeability, failure‑mode analysis, and incident response.
Excel at systematic debugging, test‑driven development, and writing clean, well‑reviewed code.
Communicate clearly and enjoy partnering with frontend, backend, and product teams.
Prior experience building AMMs, bridges, or MEV/intents systems.
Hands‑on work with consensus algorithms (Paxos/Raft, Tendermint, HotStuff, etc.).
Familiarity with ZK proofs, fast‑finality research, or cross‑chain messaging standards (e.g., CCIP, IBC).
Significant open‑source contributions to blockchain clients, protocol libraries, or security tools.
Top Skills
What We Do
It all started with a challenge. We were enthralled by blockchain technology and its potential to change everything on the internet, but saw that it was hampered by terrible performance. We recognized pretty early on that just attempting to make a single faster blockchain wasn’t the best solution. To truly reach web-scale on Ethereum, we would need to scale horizontally.
In 2022, we launched Caldera. With our platform, projects can deploy a rollup with a single click, without an engineering team. We take care of deployment, customization, ongoing maintenance, and security, so projects can focus on building their vision.
Today, Caldera is one of the fastest growing rollup ecosystems on Ethereum. We’ve empowered web3 teams to customize and launch over 60 high-performance rollups across a number of app categories, and projects have free reign to launch their rollup on Optimism, Arbitrum, ZKsync, and Polygon stacks.
At present, the Caldera ecosystem comprises 1.7 million unique wallets holding over $800 million in TVL, with more than 60 million completed transactions. Some notable chains in our ecosystem include Manta Pacific, inEVM by Injective, ApeChain, Treasure, Plume Network, Towns, Kinto, RARI Chain, and Zero Network by Zerion.
To learn more, visit www.caldera.xyz or follow us on X/Twitter at www.x.com/calderaxyz
