Compensation

Competitive

Remote within

North America
South America

Contract type

Full time

Remote working

Technologies & frameworks

Web3
Ethereum
Smart Contracts
React
Solidity

Benefits & perks

Remote working
Flexible working
Unlimited vacation
Equity

Bring fire to DeFi 🔥

Role overview

Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) is the team building Buttonwood Bonds, an on-chain market for long-term debt. We’re the first team to build a liquidation-free debt market, unlocking safe DeFi borrowing for the vast majority of users.

Money markets have three core components—short-term debt (demand-deposit markets), exchanges, and long-term debt (bonds). DeFi today has exchanges and short-term lending with scale, as evidenced by the size of Uniswap, Compound, and Aave. But long-term lending is still missing.
Long-term debt is non-callable debt. This means freedom from margin calls and liquidations. For example, a drop in the value of your home does not trigger the liquidation of your house—rather, only multiple missed payments can bring the house into foreclosure. In contrast, short-term debt can lead to liquidations during times of high volatility.

The Buttonwood Foundation’s mission is to grow both the web3 bond market and a new generation of decentralized finance (DeFi) instruments—including fiat-free stablecoins, yield splitters, and long/short options. Our projects are composed of simple, open contracts—we seek not to build a platform or walled garden, but a set of tools open to all.

The Buttonwood Foundation is backed by True Ventures, Framework Ventures, BlockTower Capital, NfX, Bitfinex/Tether, Mechanism Capital, Bixin, Founders Collective, and numerous DeFi founders (including from Coingecko, Balancer, Cozy, Syndicate, and many more).

About you

Great PRL engineers are self-driven, passionate, innovative, and have an affinity for thoroughly designing and thinking through complex systems.

As a smart contract engineer, you will help us build foundational smart contracts that will power the next generation of DeFi applications.

You are incredibly curious in general, and passionate about DeFi specifically. You are excited to think about what DeFi can do and are not shy about new products and approaches.

Last but not least, we are a small team. You have a track record of improving how you work in teams, including working on clarity, frequency of communication, and helping others. You value robustness, minimalism, and speed in your code.

Responsibilities

Produce high quality, performant, and well-tested Solidity code
Architect smart contract infrastructure
Achieve comprehensive unit and integration test coverage
Write specs and review PRs from teammates
Implement the Buttonwood Bond Market smart contracts and tests
Implement and design periphery contracts for Buttonwood Bond Market
Implement decentralized web application experiences
Work with the team to design, deploy, and maintain highly usable user experiences
Write robust test suites for web applications

Job Requirements

Experience building and releasing production grade smart-contracts
An understanding of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and the DeFi and Web3 ecosystem
Strong problem solving skills
Strong communication and collaboration skills
Strong sense of ownership
Interest or experience in open, decentralized, permissionless technologies, and the intersection of contemporary technology, economics, finance and governance.
Must be willing to overlap with Pacific Time Zone
Bonus: Experience or interest in contributing to frontend development
Bonus: Experience with React, Redux, and other frontend technologies
Bonus: Bachelor's degree in computer science or related discipline

Benefits

Competitive Salary (TBD based on experience)
Token Incentive Plan (TBD based on experience)
Comprehensive Insurance, flexible hours, unlimited vacation
Fully remote (if desired–California/Bay Area preferred)

Prometheus Research Labs

Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) is a software development team creating and implementing various DeFi protocols for the Buttonwood Foundation, including liquidity aggregation, price-stabilization wrappers, governance, peer-to-peer lending, and risk stratification. PRL’s approach to innovation focused on composability. The Buttonwood contracts are designed to be building blocks, not walled gardens. Thus, they are open-source and as minimal as possible—we seek to build primitives to be used by the entirety of digital finance, not platforms to extract value from the ecosystem. These protocols can be used and incorporated into any other protocol without restriction. We are a team of historians, engineers, and designers, united by the belief that DeFi is not yet the future of finance—it is still struggling to reproduce financial products that have been around for hundreds of years. To build the a new financial system, we must first first rebuild old finance in a truly decentralized form. Thus, our mission is historically inspired—financial innovation has proceeded in episodic bursts on the back of key inventions that rapidly spread in decentralized financial networks. Our vision is for the Buttonwood’s historically-tested primitives to catalyze a transformation in how DeFi works and help give birth to tradeable fixed-income markets, collateralized leverage tokens, and, eventually, a fully decentralized “dollar.”