Smart Contract Engineer

Category Labs (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to design and build step-function improvements over existing blockchain solutions. After raising $225M in series A funding, led by Paradigm, we are growing our team.

### What You Will Do - You’ll implement smart contracts that are well suited to the resources and throughput enabled by the Monad client built by Category Labs. - You’ll identify needs in the app developer ecosystem and address them through close collaboration with the core engineering team. - You’ll work directly with external application or infrastructure teams to unblock them with deep understanding of their domain AND the Category Labs client.

### Who You Are - You have at least 4 years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years of experience writing smart contracts in Solidity. - You have prior experience in blockchain engineering at a Layer-1, Layer-2, or Infrastructure (Oracle, Bridge, Indexer, RPC Provider, Wallet, or other high-performance app) project. - You are an expert with tools like Foundry and Hardhat and deeply understand security vulnerabilities at the application layer. - You have backend engineering experience in low-level languages such as C, C++, or Rust. - You have built something significant from scratch - preferably with users (the more, the better). - You are a great communicator who is willing to participate in technical discussions, reviews, and documentation. - You value the following qualities that define our engineering team: Ability to DO things. When it comes to problem-solving, we value practicality and common sense. Strong design skills (e.g. higher-level thinking about system design, appropriate abstractions, maintainability) Excellence in whatever you have worked on before Rigorous development mindset.

### Why Work with Us - Challenging problems. You’ll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact. See our Blogs and Papers & Talks for a flavor of the problems we are solving in the real world. - Huge opportunity. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard is ubiquitous, but existing EVM-compatible chains are very slow. Monad’s core innovations offer developers the best of both worlds (portability and performance) and are a game-changer for mass user adoption in crypto. - The right team. You’ll be part of a small, exceptional team. - Culture. We’re a lean team working together to achieve very ambitious goals. We are united in our culture of collaboration, low egos, and high-quality outputs. As an early member of our team, you’ll help to shape our culture. - Compensation. You’ll receive a competitive salary and equity package. - Resources and growth. We’re well-capitalized, with backing from leading venture funds like Paradigm, Electric Capital, Greenoaks, Dragonfly, and Coinbase Ventures. We keep a lean team, and this is a rare opportunity to join. You’ll learn a lot and grow as our company scales. ### Salary and benefits The target annual salary range for this US-based role is $180,000 – $250,000. This range represents our good-faith estimate at the time of posting and is not a guarantee of compensation. The final offer may vary based on factors including experience, domain expertise, and the candidate’s specific geographic location. ### Benefits for US employees include - World class benefits package (medical/dental/vision). - Unlimited paid time off. - 401(k) retirement plan + company match. - Lunch and dinner stipend (in-office NYC). - Monthly wellness benefit. - Paid parental leave. Benefits for employees hired through an EOR (outside of the US) will be based on EOR offerings and country-specific requirements.

Category Labs is a blockchain infrastructure company building Monad, a 100% EVM-compatible layer 1 designed for high performance, low hardware requirements, and decentralized execution. The company describes itself as a team of systems engineers and researchers focused on making complex decentralized systems dramatically faster.