Founding Engineer

Monaco is a crypto-native research and development group building high-performance infrastructure for open financial systems. We’re a small, senior team operating at the intersection of TradFi speed and DeFi composability. If you thrive in fast-moving environments, write production-grade code, and have opinions about blockspace and market structure, we’d love to meet you.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to the core engineering efforts behind Monaco’s CLOB (Central Limit Order Book), supporting both spot trading and perpetual futures trading instruments.
• Build and optimize low-latency trading infrastructure, with both on and offchain nuances
• Lead the smart contract development for Monaco’s EVM-based perpetuals product (Solidity)
• Improve performance of order matching systems with a strong focus on latency and reliability
• Ship production code for Monaco v1 and lead explorations into v2 architecture with the Sei Labs

You Might Be a Fit If You

• Have 3+ years of engineering experience, building low latency trading systems ideally across both TradFi and DeFi stacks
• Have worked at or adjacent to HFT firms (e.g., Citadel, Cubist, AQR, Jump, HRT) or were part of early engineering teams at CLOB protocols/perp DEXs (like dYdX, Hyperliquid, Vertex)
• Bring experience in Rust and Solidity, with the ability to navigate low-level systems and smart contracts
• Have built or traded DeFi strategies and understand the nuances of institutional users, market structure, performance optimization, and gas fees
• Must be based in NYC or willing to relocate