What is Stride?

Stride is an appchain bringing liquid staking (LS) to crypto. Stride is building the future of interchain DeFi, looking to bring core, novel technology to every Proof-of-Stake chain.

We raised $6.75m in May 2022 and launched our product on September 4th. Since then, we’ve reached $200k ARR, over 10K users, $10m in deposits to the platform, and are rapidly growing!

Today, Lido is the largest LS provider. They launched 2 years ago through smart-contracts, have $6B TVL, and generate $340m/yr in fees, but only operate on a handful of chains. Stride’s approach is different, and designed to be scaled. We are building a blockchain that can deploy LS to arbitrarily many chains. As a result, Stride is aiming to support a dozen chains by EOY, and 50+ chains by the end of 2023. 

Stride has partnered with top crypto VCs, including Pantera, Distributed Global, North Island Ventures, 1Confirmation, Picus, Road Capital, Node Ventures, and many others. 

What is it like Working for Stride?

• Engineering-first mindset. All 3 cofounders are engineers, and the product is highly technical. We aim to be one of the most innovative teams in the space

• Lean, efficient team. Team of 8 launched the product within 6 months. We’re striving to remain lean as we scale our product 

• Ownership. Each team member is given large amounts of responsibility and flexibility for how to set goals, execute, and measure their progress.

• Years of runway. $6.75m raised 5 months ago

• Standard startup perks. Fully covered medical and dental (in US), 401k, ability to work 100% remotely, free lunch, conference tickets, hackathons, etc. 

• Top comp with lots of upside. $100k-300k with flexible token and equity grants. 

What is the Role?

Stride is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to (1) work on Stride’s chain and (2) build open-source infra supporting the protocol or Cosmos in general. 

Because Stride is its own chain, the space of things to optimize and improve is significantly larger than for, say, smart contracts. Stride also relies on extremely novel interchain communication technology. We think both of these lead to quite exciting engineering challenges. 

A few things we’re working on:

• Safety. LS usually secures large amounts of assets, so the chains are common targets for hackers. Stride has some novel security features, such as embedding sanity-checks deep in the chain code (that should hopefully auto-detect and crash the chain in case of attack). We want to further develop “self-healing” technology, where the chain automatically prevents bad actors. 

• Interchain communication. Stride is the first production use-case of IBCv3, which allows chain A to control accounts on chain B. As a result, we are making core open-source contributions to this code base. IBC is currently the state-of-the-art for how two chains talk to each other, and we hope to continue innovating here.

• Interchain Security. Stride will be one of the first blockchains to share a validator set with the Cosmos Hub. You will work very closely with the Informal Systems team to roll out this new Proof of Stake design. Stride is included in the vision for Cosmos 2.0.

• Open-source infra. Cosmos is the fastest-growing ecosystem in crypto, but its infrastructure drastically lags Ethereum. We’re working on core ecosystem infra, and want to continue to improve and push for its adoption in the space.

What is Stride Looking For?

• 2-8 years of experience

• Location: remote (though we have an office in NYC you’re welcome to use)

• Work schedule of 40 hours/week, up to 60 hours/week in extremely busy periods

• Well-rounded engineering background 

• Technical requirements: experience writing production-quality code, comfortable scoping + implementing open-ended feature requests

• Technical nice-to-have: golang, distributed systems experience, experience building L1 blockchains, tendermint/cosmos-sdk