Principal Engineer Protocol at Pagoda

About The Role:

The Protocol Engineering team at Pagoda is responsible for the infrastructure of Layer 1 Blockchain, NEAR Protocol. We focus on building scalable, performant, and reliable infrastructure to actualize visions of NEAR Protocol, including the Blockchain Operating System (BOS).

We are growing our engineering team that develops the Blockchain protocol specification and its implementation. You will be working with complex concurrent systems, complicated state machines, and novel algorithms powering NEAR Protocol blockchain.

You will own various components and drive critical initiatives throughout their life cycles, including architecture, implementation, and maintenance. You will collaborate with highly knowledgeable and skilled colleagues who are passionate about solving hard problems that can disrupt the industry.

As a principal software engineer in the team, you will work in a highly ambiguous space, identify problems to tackle, research and come up with solutions, thoroughly plan milestones, and drive end to end execution while mentoring other engineers. As a tech lead, you will partner with the engineering manager, overlook ongoing projects, draw future roadmaps, coordinate cross team collaboration, and provide technical support to team members.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Collaboration with a fully distributed team around the world.
• Architecture and implementation of complex blockchain components in Rust.
• End-to-end ownership of critical blockchain components.
• Design/proposal of new blockchain protocol changes.
• Performance optimizations and scalability/reliability improvements of Blockchain.
• Open source community contribution by collaborating with external contributors on our codebase and participating in community events.
• Performance tuning and optimizations.
• Partnering with your engineering manager and driving the team’s technical roadmap.
• Facilitating cross-functional work within the organization.
• Facilitating technical discussions, consolidating different perspectives to drive goals to execution.
• Auditing and resolving critical problems across blockchain infrastructure to provide the best user experience.
• Mentoring and supporting junior engineers

What We're Looking For:

• Ability to
  
  • Navigate through ambiguity and clarifying unknowns
  • Quickly learn and grasp complex engineering concepts; we expect you to obtain a very good understanding of the blockchain protocol
  • Write clean yet efficient code.
  • Make trade off decisions for ruthless prioritization
  • Lay out priorities and methodically make progress towards the goal.
• Fluency with algorithms and data structures.
• Creativity to come up with proof of concept from high level design while not knowing all the details.
• Effective communication skills to convey your ideas and drive technical discussions with other engineers.
• Being comfortable with diving in multiple parts of a technology stack and quickly navigate through it
• Experience with concurrency or parallelism
• Experience debugging complex concurrent systems
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related fields is a must

We'd Love If You Have:

• Familiarity with internals of other blockchains
• Professional experience with Rust alternatively but less preferred C++ or Go.
• Experience in building a blockchain smart contract or running a node in a blockchain network.
• Knowledge of cryptography
• Knowledge of compilers or virtual machines
• Knowledge of networks or operating systems

Here’s What Our Interview Process Looks Like:

Our interviews take place via Zoom and typically consists of the following stages:

• Recruiter Call
• Hiring Manager Call
• 1st Round
  • Navigating Ambiguity Interview
• Final Round
  • General Engineering Practices Interview
  • Large System Design Interview
  • Leadership Interview - Technical Leadership and Adaptability