About this role
Responsibilities
- Own Smart Wallet & AA Architecture — Own the technical strategy and architecture of our smart wallet platform, covering the account model, signing, session management, and gas abstraction at scale.
- Design the Account & Signing Model — Design and evolve our ERC-4337 user operation lifecycle (prepare → sign → submit → confirm), EIP-7702 delegation, deterministic address derivation from identity, and the session-key and permission primitives that let players act without a prompt on every transaction.
- Own Gas Abstraction — Set the paymaster and gas-sponsorship strategy: what we sponsor, how we meter and cap it, how we defend it from abuse, and how it degrades when sponsorship is unavailable.
- Harden the dApp-Facing Surface — Own the security model where our signer meets third-party applications: EIP-1193 / EIP-6963 provider behavior, origin-bound and policy-versioned sessions, trust tiers, and the transaction and signature confirmation flow. Define what a player is actually approving, and make sure the UI can prove it.
- Drive Custody & Recovery — Lead the custody roadmap from today's interim mechanisms toward MPC-based custody, and design recovery paths (passkeys, guardians, social recovery) that a non-crypto-native player can complete without losing assets.
- Drive Cross-Team Technical Decisions — Drive decisions on account architecture, SDK contracts, data modeling, and platform reliability, and build buy-in across the wallet, marketplace, SDK, mobile, and security teams.
- De-Risk Proactively — Identify systemic risks — key management, signature phishing, reorgs and indexer staleness, bundler and RPC dependencies, contract upgrade paths — and lead initiatives to resolve them before they become incidents.
- Set Engineering Standards — Define engineering standards, review critical code, contracts, and designs, and create leverage for the team through documentation, tooling, and mentorship.
- Align with Stakeholders — Collaborate with product, security, legal, and infra teams to align on roadmap and translate business and regulatory needs into well-scoped technical plans.
- Own Production Escalations — Serve as the go-to escalation point for complex production issues in the wallet and account abstraction domain.
What You Bring
Account Abstraction & Smart Wallets
- ERC-4337 Depth — Deep, hands-on understanding of ERC-4337: EntryPoint (v0.6 through v0.8), the UserOperation lifecycle, bundler and paymaster roles, validation rules (ERC-7562), gas estimation and its failure modes, counterfactual deployment, and signature validation for undeployed accounts (ERC-6492).
- EIP-7702 & the Post-Pectra Landscape — Working knowledge of EOA delegation, its interaction with ERC-4337 EntryPoint v0.8, and the trade-offs and risks it introduces (residual key authority, delegation phishing, storage collisions).
- Smart Account Implementations — Experience building on or extending production smart account implementations (Safe, Kernel, Biconomy, Coinbase Smart Wallet, or equivalent), and familiarity with modular account standards (ERC-7579 / ERC-6900).
- Session Keys & Delegated Permissions — Experience designing scoped, time-limited, policy-bound authority: session keys with TTL and contract allowlists, origin binding, permission revocation, and delegated-permission standards (ERC-7710 / ERC-7715).
- Signature Schemes & Wallet Interfaces — Practical command of EIP-712 typed data, ERC-1271 contract signatures, WebAuthn / passkey (P-256) signers, and the wallet-facing standards: EIP-1193, EIP-6963, EIP-5792 batched calls, ERC-7677 paymaster interfaces.
- Production Wallet Experience — Experience designing or operating a production smart wallet or account abstraction system serving real users and real value.
Production Crypto Track Record
- Scale in a Major Crypto Organization — Substantial engineering experience at a large crypto product or protocol organization — for example Coinbase, Kraken, Base, Safe, the Ethereum Foundation, Consensys / MetaMask — or a comparable wallet, exchange, or account-abstraction infrastructure team where wallet correctness and custody were core to the product.
- Operational Judgment Under Value at Risk — You have shipped and operated systems where a bug meant lost funds, and you can talk concretely about the guardrails, reviews, and rollback paths you put in place.
Smart Contracts & EVM
- Solidity & EVM Fluency — Ability to read, review, and write account, paymaster, and module contracts; gas-aware design; upgradeability and migration patterns; working effectively with external auditors.
- L2 Specifics — Understanding of L2 execution differences and how they affect wallet design: native account abstraction on zkSync-family chains, transaction and fee models, finality and reorg behavior, and RPC and indexer semantics.
Backend Engineering
- Go Engineering — Strong Go (Golang) engineering skills: idiomatic code, concurrency patterns, performance profiling.
- TypeScript & SDK Design — Ability to design and own client-side SDK surfaces in TypeScript that other engineering teams — internal and external — build on top of.
- Distributed Systems — Experience with distributed systems and their trade-offs (consistency, availability, failure modes), and with reconciling off-chain state against an authoritative on-chain result.
Data & Infrastructure
- PostgreSQL — Schema design, query optimization, migrations at scale.
- Kubernetes — Deploying, operating, and debugging services in a k8s environment.
- Message Streaming — Kafka or NATS — event-driven patterns, consumer groups, at-least-once delivery.
- Git & CI/CD — Git and modern CI/CD practices.
Security
- Key Management — Hands-on experience with key material in production: platform secure storage (Keychain / Keystore), HSMs, MPC or threshold signing, and the operational discipline around each.
- Wallet Threat Modeling — Solid grasp of the wallet attack surface: signature and delegation phishing, malicious dApp origins, replay and cross-chain replay, token approval abuse, and paymaster griefing and DoS.
Leadership
- Cross-Team Initiative Leadership — Proven ability to lead multi-quarter technical initiatives across teams.
- Architectural Influence — Track record of influencing architecture and standards beyond your immediate team.
- Written & Verbal Communication — You write RFCs and design docs that people actually read.
Nice to Have
- Experience working in the video game industry, building or operating platforms for game developers, publishers, or players
- Hands-on experience with the zkSync / Elastic Chain ecosystem (ZKsync OS, Matter Labs stack, native AA and paymaster flows, custom L2 operations)
- Experience with embedded and ecosystem wallet providers or AA infrastructure vendors (thirdweb, Privy, Dynamic, Turnkey, Pimlico, Alchemy, Biconomy, ZeroDev, Safe{Core}) — and clear views on where to build versus buy
- Experience with MPC / threshold custody, social recovery, or guardian-based recovery in a consumer product
- Experience with NFT and token infrastructure at scale: ERC-721 / ERC-1155 / ERC-20 mechanics, marketplace contracts, Merkle-based airdrop and claim distribution, chain indexing services
- Contributions to open-source wallet, security, or identity projects — including authorship or review of ERC / EIP standards
- Familiarity with compliance requirements relevant to crypto consumer products: KYC / AML, geofencing, MiCA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR data minimization, audit logging
- Experience with identity and auth integration for wallet derivation (OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, JWT verification, token scoping)
- Background in platform or infrastructure engineering — building systems other engineers build on top of
- Experience owning a mobile wallet surface (React Native / Expo, WebView provider injection, native signing UI)
- Hands-on, up-to-date experience with modern AI tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot, Cursor) for code generation, review, and accelerating day-to-day engineering work