Senior Protocol Engineer

Protocol Engineer Opportunity At Base

Base is planning to bring a million developers and a billion users onchain. We need your help to make that happen. We believe that the onchain platform is the most important builder platform since the internet. We believe that the onchain platform should be open source, free to use, and globally available. And we believe that in order to make it really work, we need all hands on deck, working together to scale in a secure, decentralized, easy-to-use way. At Base, we live by our values: we do the right thing, work hard, stay optimistic, prioritize the team, and push creative boundaries—all while building the future of onchain. We value a Zone 3+ work ethic, where our team rises to the challenge, embraces hard weeks, and makes small to significant personal tradeoffs when necessary to drive impact and innovation. Base is incubated within Coinbase and plans to progressively decentralize in the years ahead. We believe that decentralization is critical to creating an open, global crypto economy that is accessible to everyone. Base is built on Optimism's open-source OP Stack. We're joining as the second Core Dev team working on the OP Stack to ensure it's a public good available to everyone; and contributing a portion of sequencer revenue to funding public goods.

What you'll do:

• Hack on execution client internals (geth, reth, etc.) to extend capacity and capabilities of these systems well beyond current standards.
• Develop representative loads against which to rigorously benchmark performance.
• Improve OP stack through efforts such as reducing the footprint of data that needs to be made L1-available.
• Helping with important external scaling efforts such as PeerDAS and Danksharding.

What we look for in you:

• Some understanding of geth and/or reth internals (deep understanding of either a huge plus).
• Familiarity with database internals and high performance database systems.
• Understanding of the Ethereum scaling roadmap, and crypto-forward knowledge more generally.
• A track record of successful scaling of an existing high throughput system.
• Experience in software parallelization, including but not limited to optimistic concurrency and operation pipelining.
• Understanding of optimized approaches to Ethereum state management such as Erigon/Reth's flat DB, FirewoodDB, MonadDB, etc.
• Deep understanding of EVM internals, and (just-in-time) compilation expertise that might be applied to it.
• Crypto-forward experience, including familiarity with onchain activity such as interacting with Ethereum addresses, using ENS, and engaging with dApps or blockchain-based services.

Job #: GBBLE05

Pay Transparency Notice: Depending on your work location, the target annual salary for this position can range as detailed below. Full time offers from Coinbase also include target bonus + target equity + benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)). Pay Range: $186,065—$218,900 USD

Commitment to Equal Opportunity Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation or any other basis protected by applicable law. Coinbase will also consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

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For US applicants only, by submitting your application you are agreeing to arbitration of disputes as outlined here.

AI Disclosure For select roles, Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. A human recruiter will review your interview responses, provided in the form of a voice recording and/or transcript, to assess them against the qualifications and characteristics outlined in the job description. For select roles, Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate. The above pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment.