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 the Open Web vision where people control their data, assets, and power of governance.

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 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 technical leader for a large team of engineers, you will work in close collaboration with the Engineering Managers, oversee ongoing projects, create roadmaps, coordinate cross team collaboration, and provide technical support and guidance to the protocol engineers.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Bring in a high level of technical expertise, provide technical strategic guidance to the Protocol team.
• Architect and oversee implementation of complex blockchain components in Rust.
• Design and propose blockchain protocol innovative changes ensuring end-to-end ownership of critical blockchain components.
• Do performance optimizations and scalability/reliability improvements of blockchain.
• Audit and resolve critical problems across blockchain infrastructure to provide the best user experience.
• Contribute to the open source community by collaborating with external contributors on our codebase and participating in community events.
• Partner with Engineering Managers and drive the team’s technical roadmap, control budget and do technical resource planning.
• Facilitate technical discussions, consolidate different perspectives to drive goals to execution.
• In collaboration with Engineering Managers create a dynamic and accountable performance environment ensuring professional development of each team member.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging technologies, and competitive landscape in the blockchain engineering domain.
• Collaborate with a fully distributed team around the world.

What We’re Looking For:

• Blockchain enthusiast with 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.
• Experience with concurrency or parallelism.
• Experience debugging complex concurrent systems.
• Creativity to come up with proof of concept from high level design while not knowing all the details.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related fields is a must.
• Proven ability to work with a diverse set of internal and external stakeholders.
• Effective communication skills to convey your ideas and drive technical discussions with other engineers.

We’d Love If You Have:

• Professional experience with Rust alternatively but less preferred C++ or Go.
• Familiarity with internals of other blockchains
• 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
  • Large System Design Interview
  • Technical Presentation Q&A
• Final Round
  • Leadership Interview - Technical Leadership and Adaptability 
  • Near Culture Interview