Senior Rust Blockchain Developer — Autheo | Chain, Node, Smart Contracts & Tooling

Launch Legends•Cheyenne, WY

1d•Remote

About The Position

Launch Legends and Autheo are recruiting a senior Rust engineer for a part-time, equity- and token-based cofounder opportunity. Autheo is an AI-enabled Layer-0 operating system with an integrated Layer-1 blockchain, an EVM-compatible execution environment, IBC interoperability, and decentralized infrastructure. Rust is a first-class path in its Eigensphere Engine for execution, cryptography, and developer tooling. This is a hands-on engineering role reporting to the engineering leads. The developer will write and review production Rust for Autheo’s node, contract or runtime paths, and developer tooling; own changes from design through release; and help make the network accessible to builders through DevHub. The commitment is at least 20 hours per week. Compensation consists of equity in Launch Legends, Autheo, and the WFO Creator Network, plus Autheo token allocations. There is no cash salary. During the first 90 days, the role is expected to produce a written review of Autheo’s Rust surface, ship a node, runtime, or contract-path change through testnet rehearsal with tests and CI coverage, deliver a DevHub tooling improvement used by another team, and add a CI benchmark for a hot path.

Requirements

Provide public Rust code written by the candidate in a blockchain or systems codebase, such as a GitHub/GitLab profile, crates.io crate, or merged pull requests; include a link to the code.
At least 5 years of production Rust experience, including ownership, lifetimes, async programming (Tokio or equivalent), concurrency, and performance debugging under load.
Hands-on experience with at least one real Rust blockchain, node, runtime, or smart-contract stack; identify the repository and the candidate’s contribution.
Experience building developer tooling or libraries used by other engineers, such as a CLI, SDK, crate, or cargo-level toolchain; provide a repository or release link.
Ability to operate owned work using Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, CI pipelines, full nodes or validators, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring.
Commit at least 20 hours per week.

Nice To Haves

Contributions to a public Rust blockchain, runtime, cryptography, or tooling repository.
Cosmos SDK, IBC, or CosmWasm experience alongside Rust.
Experience with a smart-contract language, VM, or Wasm runtime such as wasmtime, wasmer, revm, or Move.
Applied cryptography in Rust, including signatures, keys, or NIST ML-KEM, ML-DSA, or SLH-DSA.
Teaching, conference talks, or workshops on Rust or blockchain engineering.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and review Rust components on the Autheo node, including consensus-adjacent paths, networking, state, synchronization, or the execution environment.
Keep node and protocol paths deterministic, tested, and safe to upgrade, coordinating with Go and protocol teams where the stacks meet.
Instrument owned components so failures can be investigated using metrics and traces.
Write and review Rust smart-contract or runtime code, such as CosmWasm, a Wasm-compatible runtime, or an equivalent contract SDK.
Own metering, host interfaces, and the invariants that ensure contract execution is deterministic and sandboxed.
Build and maintain Rust developer tooling, including CLIs, contract SDKs, cargo-level build, test, and deploy flows, and DevHub templates.
Translate protocol and runtime changes into tooling and documentation so developers can scaffold, test, and deploy through DevHub.
Create unit, property, and end-to-end tests; maintain CI that builds and tests changes and prevents bad releases; and add benchmarks for hot paths.
Operate shipped work, including testnet nodes, Kubernetes deployments, and Prometheus/Grafana dashboards.
Review Autheo’s Rust node, execution, contracts, and tooling surface and identify current, stubbed, and at-risk areas.
Ship at least one node, runtime, or contract-path change through testnet rehearsal, deliver a DevHub tooling improvement used by another team, and add a CI benchmark for an owned hot path within the first 90 days.