The Role
Conduct attacker-driven security research on Aave protocol changes, smart contracts, integrations, and critical dependencies. Review architecture and code before audits or deployment, identify exploitable protocol risks, contribute to AI-assisted security tooling, and translate findings into invariants, testing, monitoring, and incident-response improvements. Collaborate with engineers, auditors, and monitoring teams while communicating risk, severity, uncertainty, and trade-offs clearly.
Summary Generated by Built In
About us
Aave Labs began with a simple question: how do we make financial services like borrowing, saving, and earning more accessible globally?
We built the Aave Protocol, now the world’s largest and most trusted onchain lending market, connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech.
Today, we build trusted, high-quality products that expand access to lending, credit, and savings globally
Our culture
We build trusted products that help people access and discover economic opportunities.
We hold a high bar for quality and craftsmanship. No detail is too small. Trust depends on it.
We’re a global team building products people can actually use, turning complex technology into something simple and reliable.
We stay aligned, move quickly, and think long term, while keeping teams lean and focused on impact.
About the Role
Aave is looking for a Protocol Security Researcher to help build its internal protocol security function.
The role sits at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review. You will help assess major protocol changes before deployment, maintain security context across Aave’s deployed systems, and reason about the risks introduced by critical dependencies, integrations, and Aave-adjacent infrastructure.
This is not a narrow audit role. The goal is to improve Aave’s ability to understand and reduce protocol risk continuously.
How you can make an impact:
- Review major Aave protocol changes before external audit or deployment
- Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, and integrations
- Participate in design and architecture discussions early enough to influence security-relevant decisions
- Identify risks in Aave-adjacent systems, including assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, and critical dependencies
- Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and evaluate its effectiveness in real review workflows
- Turn review findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, assumptions, and testing or monitoring ideas
- Work with monitoring and incident response teams when review findings imply operational detection or response needs
- Collaborate with external auditors by helping define scope, known risks, and areas of concern
Let's connect if you have:
- 5+ years of relevant security experience
- Strong smart contract security background
- Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes
- Attacker mindset: you can move from “this looks wrong” to “this is how it could be exploited”
- Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms, including lending, liquidations, accounting, oracles, collateral, governance, and integrations
- Evidence that you are actively using AI to improve security research, review quality, or review throughput
- Clear written communication: you can explain risk, impact, uncertainty, and trade-offs to engineers and non-security stakeholders
- Good judgment about severity, exploitability, and when a finding matters
Nice to haves:
- Experience with formal methods, fuzzing, invariant testing, or custom security tooling
- Experience building internal tools for security review, code understanding, or knowledge management
- Experience working with external audit firms or leading audit engagements
- Familiarity with governance payloads, upgrade systems, permissioning, and incident response
- Open-source security research, published findings, CTFs, bug bounties, or prior public vulnerability research
Haven’t quite met all the criteria? Let’s not miss out on the chance to speak. Whilst you might not meet every single requirement, you might bring other, more exciting skills to the companies!
Equal opportunities statement:
Aave Labs celebrates diversity and views each and every team member as a separate individual with their own unique identity. No matter your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation or even the wallet you use, we welcome you at Aave Labs. As an equal opportunities employer, we take accountability and believe in everyone's potential to build, create and inspire changes. With a mission to build a diverse workforce, we are proud to foster a working environment in which everyone can feel safe and valued for who they are.
Skills Required
- 5+ years of relevant security experience
- Strong smart contract security background
- Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes
- Ability to analyze risks from an attacker’s perspective and explain how they could be exploited
- Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms, including lending, liquidations, accounting, oracles, collateral, governance, and integrations
- Evidence of actively using AI to improve security research, review quality, or review throughput
- Clear written communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Sound judgment regarding severity, exploitability, and significance of findings
- Experience with formal methods, fuzzing, invariant testing, or custom security tooling
- Experience building internal tools for security review, code understanding, or knowledge management
- Experience working with external audit firms or leading audit engagements
- Familiarity with governance payloads, upgrade systems, permissioning, and incident response
- Open-source security research, published findings, CTFs, bug bounties, or public vulnerability research
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The Company
What We Do
Aave Labs is the original author and key contributor of the Aave Protocol and a software technology company founded by Stani Kulechov. The team builds blockchain-based products that power decentralized finance, including the Aave Protocol, the Aave-native stablecoin GHO, and Horizon, an institutional platform for borrowing against tokenized real-world assets. Aave is DeFi’s largest and most trusted lending protocol, where users can earn, borrow, save, and swap alongside millions of others worldwide.
