Backend/Research Engineer (Rust)

CoW Protocol is on a mission to create the fairest and most efficient venue for exchanging assets on all EVM-compatible chains. Since launching a year ago, we have passed $15bn (yes, billion) in trade volume, and become the 4th most popular DEX Aggregator on the market – now we’re aiming for #1. If you are a high-performing team player who wants to work on some of the most important problems in Ethereum (MEV protection, batch auctions, and more), we want to talk to you!

• Location: Onsite or remote
• Position: Full-time contractor

About the role

We are looking for an enthusiastic, self-motivated backend/research engineer who is fluent in rust to help us build the next generation of decentralized trading protocols. As part of the Innovation Team, you will be exposed to the newest development in the blockchain space. You will build prototypes for new business cases such as multi-chain swaps or adapt the current protocol for new chains. Furthermore, you will be responsible for ensuring that new features/systems are built in a reliable and maintainable manner with the rest of the team. To ensure the compatibility of new ideas with the current system, you will interact with many of the other groups within CowSwap.

You will have the opportunity to work with us in one of our existing co-working spaces in Berlin or Lisbon. Alternatively, you can join us as a remote employee and work from your hometown, where we can also provide membership for a local coworking space.

What you will do

• Develop new ideas and features to make the Cowswap experience better: this involves building prototypes and expanding our Rust backend infrastructure, as well as writing new smart contracts and scripts in TypeScript
• Extend the reach of Cowswap by deploying to new blockchains or L2- systems: Smart contract adaptions, Backend infrastructure features, and integrations
• Research new business use-cases
• Work closely with researchers and product managers to investigate current use cases and come up with new solutions for challenging technological problems
• Deliver high-quality code for features from concept until production
• Provide insight on your code: define Grafana metrics to monitor the health of our production systems
• Give thoughtful and in-depth code reviews of your colleagues’ contributions to our open-source codebase

Who you are

• You have 3+ years of experience in software development, preferably in a system engineering language like Rust
• You have excellent computer science, programming, and algorithmic skills
• Experience with architecting complex software systems
• You care deeply about the quality and readability of your code
• You proactively give technical direction such as improving performance, preventing issues, data usage, refactoring the codebase
• You are a team player, a strong communicator, and love to share your knowledge with others
• You collaborate effectively with a remote-first team on a large, open-source codebase
• You are enthusiastic about web3

It’s a plus if you bring:

• Experience within the blockchain space
• Experience with smart contract development in solidity

What we can offer you

• Working on the cutting edge of DeFi
• Attractive cow-token compensation additional to a competitive base salary
• Excited about joining a decentralized company? → Flexibility and “remote first” are at the core of our culture. We started working asynchronously long before the pandemic and are a diverse international team
• Is there something that interests you outside of your core tasks? → You can use your Friday afternoons on research or any side project in our ecosystem
• Conference budget to keep up to date with the developments of the ecosystem
• Learning budget to support your higher ambitions
• Our hierarchy is flat, so there is no chance of getting lost in vertical looking organizational structure
• Impact: you are joining a startup where you can make a huge difference. Your work matters!