Founding Protocol Engineer

About Palette Labs

Palette Labs is building a decentralized protocol for commerce. Our first major use case is food delivery. We run a profitable, growing network where customers order from restaurants, drivers deliver food, and local operators spin up their own marketplaces. Think Uber Eats, but permissionless and owned by the people who use it.

We’re now focused on unlocking restaurant access at scale and maturing the underlying protocol that powers our network. That means designing verifiable data models, interoperable onchain/offchain infrastructure, economic incentives, and the core primitives that allow anyone to build on top of Palette’s decentralized commerce network.

To learn more about Palette Labs and read our whitepaper take a look at: https://palette-labs-inc.github.io/

About the Role

This Founding Protocol Engineer role is critical to defining and building the decentralized protocol that underpins all of Palette Labs. You will architect and implement the core smart contracts, verifiable data models, onchain/offchain bridging mechanisms, and incentive structures that allow a permissionless commerce ecosystem to function at scale.

You will work closely with the founders, backend team, and marketplace operators to translate real-world commerce flows into robust decentralized primitives. Success will be measured by the security and correctness of the protocol, the successful rollout of onchain components into production environments, and your ability to lead major protocol milestones in the first 6–12 months — including contract deployments, incentive mechanism design, and integrations with external chains, standards, and tooling.

This is a founding role: your decisions will define Palette’s protocol architecture for years to come.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement core smart contracts (EVM or other chains) that encode key protocol logic — incentives, identity, attribution, settlement, and verifiable event streams.

• Develop verifiable data models and cryptographic proofs, enabling trust-minimized coordination between restaurants, drivers, consumers, and operators.

• Design and own onchain/offchain bridging and data attestation pipelines (e.g., signatures, proofs, optimistic verification, sequencing, indexing).

• Establish protocol-level standards for data structures, state transitions, event logs, and cross-ecosystem interoperability.

• Collaborate with backend and product teams to translate business logic into decentralized primitives that are secure, upgradeable, and verifiable.

• Lead protocol security practices, including formal reasoning, audits, fuzzing, threat modeling, and designing failure-safe upgrade patterns.

• Prototype and evaluate emerging web3 infrastructure, including L2s, DA layers, indexing frameworks, wallets, and key management tools.

• Define long-term protocol architecture, including economic incentives, governance considerations, and modularity for new use cases beyond food delivery.

• Mentor early engineers on decentralized design patterns, smart contract engineering, and protocol-level decision making.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years of production web3 or smart contract engineering.

• Deep expertise in EVM development (Solidity, Vyper, or equivalent), including security best practices, testing, gas optimization, and upgrade patterns.

• Experience designing verifiable, high-integrity systems using cryptographic primitives (signatures, Merkle structures, proofs, etc.).

• Strong understanding of protocol architecture — state machines, sequencing, event logs, indexing, and data availability considerations.

• Hands-on experience building production-grade onchain/offchain systems, including interactions between smart contracts and backend services.

• Proven ability to design from first principles, especially when standard solutions don’t exist.

• Strong product instincts with the ability to simplify complex mechanisms into intuitive, usable primitives.

• Experience collaborating on high-level protocol design, not just contract implementation.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with mechanism design, incentive systems, or token-driven ecosystems (does not need to be DeFi).

• Familiarity with L2 architectures, including optimistic rollups, ZK rollups, DA layers, or modular execution environments.

• Experience building verifiable offchain compute or trust-minimized APIs (e.g., oracles, attestation frameworks, optimistic systems).

• Knowledge of indexing and data pipelines (The Graph, Subgraphs, custom indexers, Firehose, etc.).

• Experience with event-driven backend systems, distributed systems, or consensus protocols.

• Contributions to open-source web3 projects or standards (ERCs, EIPs, CIP/CAIPs, etc.).

• Interest in decentralized commerce, marketplace design, or reputation systems.

Compensation & Details

Total Rewards Package

We believe in a comprehensive and competitive compensation strategy that rewards talent and drive. Our Total Rewards Package typically includes:

• Base Salary: A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards.

• Performance Bonus: Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements.

• Equity / Stock Options: We offer stock options to all full‑time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth.

Comprehensive Benefits

We are committed to the health, well‑being, and long‑term financial security of our team. Benefits coverage typically begins on the first day of employment.

• Health & Wellness: 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees.

• Time Off: Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy

Unless otherwise stated, all roles with Palette Labs are remote-based in the United States with a preference to hire in New York City. We require that you overlap some working hours with Eastern Standard Time (EST).