Senior Core Developer

Role summary

The Stateless Consensus team is looking for a Senior Core Developer to help make Ethereum stateless. You will prototype and implement protocol changes across multiple execution clients, collaborate with researchers and ecosystem stakeholders on design decisions, and communicate the team's work to the broader community. Your contributions will directly shape how Ethereum scales and decentralizes over the coming years.

About the Ethereum Foundation

The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a global non-profit organization dedicated to assisting the Ethereum ecosystem in realizing the potential of Ethereum as an open, neutral infrastructure for the world. In practice, we dynamically allocate resources to critical projects when needed and step back when others can take the lead.

About the team

The Stateless Consensus team's mission is to make Ethereum stateless — enabling blocks to become self-contained units of execution, removing the need for nodes to store the entire state of the network.

The team currently consists of 4 people collaborating via instant messaging and bi-weekly calls. We work closely with other execution and consensus client teams, protocol researchers, and ecosystem contributors.

Our active projects include:

• Binary Tries (EIP-7864): designing and implementing a new state tree with efficient proof generation, using SNARK-friendly hash functions

• State conversion: transitioning the existing Merkle Patricia Trie state to the new tree format, including data encoding, code chunking, and migration tooling

• State expiry: actively designing mechanisms to limit the size of the active state — a long-sought feature for Ethereum now made feasible by statelessness

Key responsibilities

• Prototype and implement stateless Ethereum protocol changes across multiple execution clients (go-ethereum, Nethermind, Reth, etc.)

• Design and evaluate new tree structures (binary tries) and their trade-offs

• Contribute to state conversion tooling and testing on devnets and testnets

• Collaborate with protocol researchers on state expiry, proof systems, and code chunking designs • Write and maintain specifications and documentation

• Communicate the team's progress through blog posts, presentations, and AllCoreDevs discussions

• Review code and participate in cross-client interoperability efforts

Required skills and experience

Hard skills

• Strong knowledge of the Ethereum protocol (EVM, state management, consensus)

• Proficiency in at least one of: Go, Rust, or C#

• Experience with blockchain client internals or protocol-level development

• Understanding of cryptographic primitives (hash functions, Merkle trees)

• Familiarity with open-source contribution workflows (GitHub, code review, CI/CD)

• DevOps skills: testing infrastructure, CI pipelines, deployment of testnets/devnets

Nice to have

• Experience with Zig and/or Python

• Knowledge of SNARK/STARK proving systems • Experience with state trie implementations or database internals

Soft skills

• Excellent written and verbal communication — you'll be explaining complex protocol changes to diverse audiences

• Collaborative mindset — comfortable working across teams and organizations • Constructive in design discussions, able to evaluate trade-offs objectively

Meta skills

• Manager of one: you take ownership of your work, set your own priorities, and drive projects forward without needing close supervision

• Ability to navigate ambiguity — protocol research often involves open questions and evolving designs

• Strong problem-solving skills — debugging complex distributed systems and cryptographic implementations