Senior Substrate Engineer (DeFi)

About Acala

Acala’s mission is to build and nurture the autonomous financial infrastructure of the decentralized web. Delivering on this mission will bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system.

Our core project is the Acala Network itself, which we expect to become the de facto DeFi parachain and stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot provides the underlying trust primitives to our parachain, upon which we’ve built our suite of financial primitives including; Multi-collateralized Stablecoin; Trustless Staking Derivatives, and Unified Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and burn away all need for the parasitic intermediaries that inhabit almost every conventional trust-based financial system.

We have secured our support from eminent backers like Polychain, Coinbase Venture, Pantera and many more. We’re still preparing Acala’s parachain launch, so there’s no better time to join our mission and be a part of the future that we’re building. Because whoever you are, we’re building it for you 🚀

About the role

As a Substrate Engineer your role will focus on the design and development of the Acala DeFi primitives; a trustless staking derivative (liquid DOT), a multi-collateralized stablecoin backed by cross-chain assets (aUSD), and an AMM DEX – all with micro gas fees that can be paid in any token. You’ll be expected to deliver production level code with little management or supervision, and to contribute new development ideas to our ongoing projects. You won’t be working alone, and you’ll have a lot of support from Bryan Chen and the other members of the Engineering Team. You can read more about our team in the section below.

Our ideal candidate(s) will have experience working in a production environment on a substrate-based blockchain, and will be able to discuss writing high-performance high-security Rust code at interview. We’re expecting to hire someone who is very familiar with substrate, and blockchain EVMs, but we’re open to a wide range of candidates that might have been focused on other areas of decentralised application development. If you can demonstrate this in a short Rust-based evaluation exercise for us, then we want to hear from you.

What you’ll do

• Design & build Substrate-based blockchain applications
• Create Substrate specifications from high-level proposals
• Build new DeFi primitives and improve the existing Acala suite
• Write high-performance high-security Rust code from specifications
• Make security a top priority and create high-quality software documentation

What it takes

• Substrate Development Experience, for any Blockchain
• Senior-level Rust / C++ development experience (5+yrs)
• Strong knowledge of Decentralised application concepts
• Familiar with common data structure and crypto algorithms
• Passion about decentralised applications and the DeFi future
• Ability to work independently with little supervision

What we offer

• Competitive contract-based compensation (you’ll have to invoice us from wherever you are)
• Flexible working hours within Pacific timezones
• Collaborative, transparent and empowering work culture
• Meaningful work on creating better technologies for a fairer future
• Opportunity to work in a multinational, high-performance team with diverse backgrounds

More Information

• Series A statement by CEO Ruitao Su
• Web3 Grant statement by COO Bette Chen
• Coinbase investment statement by Growth VP Dan Reecer
• Get started! Try out our Testnet for yourself

Our Team

Working across New Zealand, the USA & China, our team has emerged from our shared desire for a fairer and more inclusive financial system - in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings of the current institutions that run the world. We’re just people like you, but we’re some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate and Rust developers, full-stack dApp developers and economists.

Our Values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans:

• Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect
• Empowerment
• Guidance and Support
• Friendship, Community, Real Relationships

We’re building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of web3:

• True decentralization
• Less Trust, More Truth
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Empowering individuals with more autonomy

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in 2019 as an early Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and is an ecosystem and education partner of W3F and Polkadot. We have delivered 3 successful live testnet candidates acquiring 14,000 new accounts and 140,000 transactions within the first 3 weeks. And we expect to be among the first to launch on both Kusama and Polkadot in 2021. Stay tuned!

For more information on this position, our employment conditions, or anything Acala related not linked above, get in touch with our Auckland-based Talent Manager: [email protected].