Staff Software Engineer, Core

Stellar Development Foundation•San Francisco, CA

6h•$190,000 - $320,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem. We are looking for a talented, experienced, and hands-on engineer to join our team. In this role you’ll be designing, building, and implementing changes to Stellar Core - the primary distributed system that is used for maintaining Stellar's ledger and obtaining global consensus. As a member of our team, you'll have the opportunity to work on a wide variety of problems focused on growing and scaling our global network. This includes designing and implementing features that increase the performance of the network (peer to peer networking and processing performance), decentralization (resilience to nodes failing or coordinating to attack the network) as well as proper incentive mechanics for network participants. You’ll be playing with formal models and verification (consensus), simulation (confirm emergent properties) in addition to typical scalability problems (distributed and multi-core).

Requirements

You have 8+ years of experience developing software on a team.
You have a BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent field.
You excel in writing code in modern C++ or Rust in a production environment.
You're a great communicator that can advocate and lead technical discussions, especially during the design and code review process.
You have a solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build components that are reusable, extensible, and modular.
You are knowledgeable of best practices and development tools and are passionate about technological innovation.
You have a passion for performance debugging and benchmarking.
You love a good challenge in an ever-evolving space - many of the challenges we face are being faced for the first time!
You're enthusiastic about working on a small, growing team where you'll be given a lot of autonomy.
You're open, empathetic, and care about putting the best ideas forward in a collaborative and helpful manner.

Nice To Haves

You have direct experience with designing and implementing distributed systems.
You have a strong curiosity in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and understand the fundamentals of these systems.

Responsibilities

Design and build key components of Stellar Core - the backbone software behind the Stellar Network.
Design and develop robust, scalable, and extensible technologies that empower our developers and network participants.
Collaborate on new architectures and subsystems, working alongside our CTO, our team of engineers, and our community of open source developers.
Write clean, maintainable code with an emphasis on edge case analysis and future-proofing our work.
Own core subsystems of Stellar Core, and help the team hit critical product milestones.
Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for all of engineering at SDF.
Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks in order to continue scaling the system.
Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications - we take design seriously, and we encourage everyone to be a part of our RFC processes.

Benefits

Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents
Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break
Up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave for both non-birthing and birthing parents, as well as up to 14 weeks of paid pregnancy leave for birthing parents
Gym reimbursement ($80 per month)
Life & ADD (up to $50K)
Short & Long term disability
401K with 4% match
Health & Dependent Care FSA Accounts
Commuter benefits with $250/month employer contribution
Health Savings Account (HSA) with monthly employer contribution
Family building benefits through Kindbody
Wellbeing benefits (One Medical, Rightway, Headspace)
L&D budget of $1,500/year
Daily lunch and snacks in office
Company retreats