Protocol Security Researcher

Aave Labs

8d

About The Position

Aave is looking for a Protocol Security Researcher to help build its internal protocol security function. The role sits at the intersection of smart contract security, protocol design, adversarial research, and AI-assisted review. You will help assess major protocol changes before deployment, maintain security context across Aave’s deployed systems, and reason about the risks introduced by critical dependencies, integrations, and Aave-adjacent infrastructure. This is not a narrow audit role. The goal is to improve Aave’s ability to understand and reduce protocol risk continuously.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant security experience
• Strong smart contract security background
• Ability to independently review complex codebases and reason about protocol-level failure modes
• Attacker mindset: you can move from “this looks wrong” to “this is how it could be exploited”
• Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms, including lending, liquidations, accounting, oracles, collateral, governance, and integrations
• Evidence that you are actively using AI to improve security research, review quality, or review throughput
• Clear written communication: you can explain risk, impact, uncertainty, and trade-offs to engineers and non-security stakeholders
• Good judgment about severity, exploitability, and when a finding matters

Nice To Haves

• Experience with formal methods, fuzzing, invariant testing, or custom security tooling
• Experience building internal tools for security review, code understanding, or knowledge management
• Experience working with external audit firms or leading audit engagements
• Familiarity with governance payloads, upgrade systems, permissioning, and incident response
• Open-source security research, published findings, CTFs, bug bounties, or prior public vulnerability research

Responsibilities

• Review major Aave protocol changes before external audit or deployment
• Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, and integrations
• Participate in design and architecture discussions early enough to influence security-relevant decisions
• Identify risks in Aave-adjacent systems, including assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, and critical dependencies
• Contribute to AI-assisted security tooling and evaluate its effectiveness in real review workflows
• Turn review findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, assumptions, and testing or monitoring ideas
• Work with monitoring and incident response teams when review findings imply operational detection or response needs
• Collaborate with external auditors by helping define scope, known risks, and areas of concern

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed