About the Role
As a Senior Blockchain Engineer at Ondo, you will own the design of our smart contract systems - not just the contracts themselves, but how they're deployed, secured, monitored, and managed across their entire lifetime, and how they connect to the people and products that depend on them.
You'll design secure, efficient, and scalable smart contract solutions across many blockchain ecosystems powering Real World Asset (RWA) tokenization. But the harder and more important part of this role is everything around the contract: keeping it secure from deploy through every day it's live, building tooling that lets non-technical teammates safely view and manage on-chain state, and creating automated systems that take manual, error-prone work off the table.
You'll think about how a smart contract design decision ripples outward, to the web app, to the teams operating the system day to day, and ultimately to our end users. You'll collaborate with product, legal, compliance, web, and ops to make sure contracts are technically sound, regulatorily aligned, and genuinely operable by the teams who rely on them day to day. Throughout, you'll favor simple, elegant designs that let us move quickly and safely.
This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of finance by building the systems that bring real-world assets on-chain, and by making those systems something a whole organization can build on with confidence.
Responsibilities
- Smart Contract System Design: Architect entire smart contract systems for Ondo's evolving product suite — covering new chain deployments, novel DeFi interoperability and bridging solutions, and DeFi protocols — with security, operability, and long-term maintainability designed in from the start.
- Lifecycle Security & Operations: Own contract security not just at deploy but across the full lifetime of the system — including upgrade safety, administrative controls, and the operational guardrails that keep things safe as they evolve.
- Tooling & Automation: Build tooling and automated systems that let non-technical teammates safely view, monitor, and manage contracts without writing scripts or touching raw chain operations directly.
- Cross-Functional Integration: Connect smart contract design to the rest of the product — helping the web team integrate cleanly, helping operational teams monitor and manage without direct scripting, and ensuring design decisions flow sensibly through to end users.
- Technical Leadership: Serve as tech lead and subject matter expert for blockchain projects, guiding the engineering team toward high-impact, scalable solutions and making sound technical decisions aligned with long-term goals.
Requirements
- Based in PT, MT, CT, or ET time zones.
- Excellent technical and non-technical communication skills, verbal and written.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 5+ years of software engineering experience.
- 3+ years in blockchain engineering, ideally from another DeFi protocol live on multiple chains.
- Strong competency with Solidity; exposure to non-EVM smart contract languages a plus — particularly Solana.
- Demonstrated ability to design systems, not just contracts — including tooling, automation, security across the contract lifecycle, and the integration points between contracts, applications, and operational teams.
- Proven results building and scaling a DeFi protocol.
- Python and/or TypeScript experience preferred (for building tooling and automation).
- Strong technical grasp and excellent judgment on task prioritization.
- Strong emphasis on understanding the "why" behind requirements and a commitment to defining the "minimum scope."
What we offer
•Competitive compensation including salary, future token rights, and/or equity (according to your preferences) — we're well-funded and believe that great talent deserves great compensation.
•Full benefits (medical, vision, and dental) and flexible vacation policy (PTO).
•Small remote-first team across many countries — you'll be an early team member helping shape our vision, culture, and design practices.
•A+ colleagues — our team includes alumni from: Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Two Sigma, Bridgewater, SpaceX, AWS, Meta, Google, McKinsey, Circle, Uniswap.
•Best-in-class investors — we are proud to be backed by leading crypto experts and VCs, including Pantera Capital, Founders Fund and Coinbase Ventures.
