Forward Deployed Engineer

Description

About Matter Labs

Matter Labs builds private cryptographic infrastructure that lets regulated institutions settle directly with each other without exposing data, ceding control, or waiting days. Global finance moves $4 quadrillion a year on systems designed for paper and telex. The institutions that built them - from clearing houses to exchanges to the world's largest banks, institutions are now actively replacing them. We're building what comes next.

Our core product, Prividium, gives each institution its own private environment (a Prividium Zone) with independent governance and built-in interoperability across counterparties, asset classes, and jurisdictions. Interoperability happens through zero-knowledge proofs: one party proves a transaction is valid without revealing any underlying data to the counterparty. The only private settlement infrastructure built on zero-knowledge cryptography.

Founded in 2018. Backed by a16z and Union Square Ventures. A fully remote team of around 70 with eight years of production zero-knowledge infrastructure behind us, now pointed at the biggest problem in institutional finance.

Responsibilities

• You will be the engineer embedded with our institutional customers, taking Prividium from a signed deal to a live chain inside their environment. The institutions running on it are banks, custodians, and clearing houses moving real value on infrastructure built decades ago. What you deploy becomes part of how they operate.
• Requirements from an institution arrive as a description of the system being replaced, because that is how large organizations specify work, and because the obligations underneath are decades of accumulated regulation, audit, and control. Reading through to those obligations is the hard part of this job. We need someone who can find them, design the general thing that satisfies them for this customer and the next four, and put it in front of the customer's engineers as a firm recommendation they can push back on.
• Own deployments end to end: integration code, permissioning, node topology, upgrade paths, and the runbook the customer's ops team will use.
• Build the reference applications that prove a use case, across collateral movement, tokenized deposit transfer, and settlement flows.
• Carry the pager for Prividium and the services we run around it, including the night something breaks and the fix that stops it breaking again.
• Work with the Head of Product and Head of Sales on which accounts to go deep on, and with our core engineering team on what graduates from a deployment into the platform.
• The people who do well here would rather ship a rough working version on Thursday than present a diagram on Friday. They can say how confident they are in a recommendation and what would change their mind. The rarest trait is taste: seeing the good general solution inside a hard set of constraints and telling it apart from the merely clever one.

Requirements

• Production software you have owned and run, including carrying a pager for it.
• A strong coder. TypeScript or Rust in your day to day, or deep fluency in a comparable language such as Java, C, Go, or Python and the ability to pick ours up fast.
• Serious time inside customer environments, whether as a forward deployed engineer, a solutions architect, or a technical founder. Former founders are strongly encouraged to apply.
• We are hiring two people into this role and we are not looking for one person who covers both of the areas below. Depth in one is what matters.
• If you come from banking
• Experience building or integrating software for financial institutions or regulated financial infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of the systems banks run: core banking platforms, custody and key management, identity and entitlements, ISO 20022 or comparable messaging standards, enterprise auth and network architecture.
• Fluency with risk, compliance, controls, SLAs, and procurement.
• No blockchain experience required. We will teach you the stack.
• If you come from crypto infrastructure
• Experience with Ethereum execution clients and node internals. Direct reth experience is a strong signal.
• Rust in production, since that is where the node work lives.
• Comfortable operating chain infrastructure in production: node topology, upgrades, sync and reorg behavior, monitoring.
• Experience with Solidity or readiness to learn it quickly and a working understanding of rollup and bridging mechanics.
• Able to explain cryptographic trust guarantees to audiences who do not have that background.
• Work model & pay
• Competitive base salary
• Performance-based variable compensation and a long-term token incentive are additional. Both are paid in ZK tokens. New-hire token grants vest over four years with a one-year cliff.
• Fully remote, with roughly 10 to 25 percent travel to customer sites depending on which accounts you carry.
• Shared on-call rotation covering Prividium and our hosted services. Everyone in this role is on it.
• Our customers are in North America and Europe, so we need working-hours overlap with those time zones.