Smart Contracts Engineer: Team Aera

Gauntlet leads the field in quantitative research and optimization of DeFi economics. We manage market risk, optimize growth, and ensure economic safety for protocols facilitating most spot trading, borrowing, and lending activity across all of DeFi, protecting and optimizing the largest protocols and networks in the industry. As of January 2025, Gauntlet manages risk and incentives covering over $35 billion in customer TVL.

Gauntlet continually publishes cutting-edge research that informs our risk models, alerts, and analysis, and is among the most cited institution — including academic institutions — in terms of peer-reviewed papers addressing DeFi as a subject. We’re a Series B company with around 75 employees, operating remote-first with a home base in New York City.

Gauntlet’s mission is to drive adoption and understanding in the financial systems of the future. Building with decentralized systems creates novel challenges for mechanism designers, smart contract developers, and end-users of financial products, which are not seen in traditional software development and investing contexts. Gauntlet is dedicated to enhancing our industry’s understanding of this new domain, and revealing how to safely navigate the true bleeding edge of 21st century financial innovation.

About Aera

Aera is a non-custodial, autonomous, on-chain asset management protocol that Gauntlet helped develop. Currently, Aera is focused on providing customizable, optimized treasury management solutions for DAOs. Gauntlet acts as the guardian for several core Aera strategies.

Ideal Candidate

This role is ideal for someone looking to “do their best work yet” in the crypto space and challenge themselves to implement a groundbreaking protocol in a nascent category. One day you will look at low-level gas optimization, another, you'll think about high-level invariants in Foundry. This will be an opportunity to make a lasting contribution by helping develop a groundbreaking protocol that solves a real use case. The right candidate understands that product success doesn't just come down to the code. They are equally excited to collaborate with other talented individuals and are comfortable taking the product perspective on protocol development occasionally.

Responsibilities

• Using industry best practices, we write and review high-assurance smart contract code, tests, invariants, and other deliverables for our protocol projects.
• Contribute ideas to protocol design & architecture and make refinements during development. Collaborate effectively with client team members.
• Embrace and contribute to our internal methodologies, coding standards, review methods, and other standard operating procedures.
• Help evaluate/research other protocols/infrastructure we could integrate with
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including researchers and product managers, to ensure seamless implementation of new features.
• Actively participate in code and design reviews, providing constructive feedback to peers and maintaining high coding standards.
• Participate in internal security audits emphasizing robust processes, continuous learning, and ownership.
• Keep up-to-date with the latest industry trends, technologies, and best practices to ensure the continuous improvement of Aera’s platform.
• Contribute to the creation of technical documentation and user guides.
• Troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve software defects, ensuring optimal system performance and reliability

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in software development.
• Proficient at writing code in Python, preferably, but open to other languages.
• 2+ years of experience in Solidity smart contract development.
• Understanding of blockchain and DeFi protocols, concepts, and best practices.
• Experience with EVM based blockchain networks strongly preferred.
• Comfortable learning about and contributing to complex DeFi protocols that may involve understanding MEV, trading, incentives, and mechanism design.
• Strong communication skills (primarily written) and the ability to work collaboratively in a distributed team environment.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Experience with version control systems (i.e., git).
• Excitement to work in an early stage setting with significant uncertainty, evolving scope/requirements and many hats to wear

Bonus Points

• Experience developing and shipping user-facing features using component-based UI frameworks

Benefits and Perks

• Remote first - work from anywhere!
• Competitive packages with the added opportunity for incentive-based compensation
• Regular in-person company retreats and cross-country "office visit" perk
• 100% paid medical, dental and vision premiums for employees
• Laptop provided
• $1,500 WFH stipend upon joining
• $100 per month reimbursement for fitness-related expenses
• Monthly reimbursement for home internet, phone, and cellular data
• Unlimited vacation policy
• 100% paid parental leave of 12 weeks
• Fertility benefits

Please note that at this time, our hiring is reserved for potential employees who can work within the contiguous United States and Canada. Should you need alternative accommodations, please note that in your application.

The national pay range for this role is $135,000 - $205,000 plus additional On Target Earnings potential by level and equity in the company. Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for a company of our size and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide. Individual pay rate decisions are based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skill set, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company.  

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