Defi Full Stack Jobs

About Sherlock

Sherlock believes that a sound currency and functioning financial system should be basic human rights. Sherlock’s mission is to help create an open, uncensorable financial system that is secure enough for billions of people to trust with their life savings. 

Traditional blockchain security reviews are a good start, but it’s not enough. That's why Sherlock provides protocols with state-of-the-art, incentive-aligned audit contests, bug bounties and smart contract coverage. 

Sherlock is the only security provider that includes a warranty after each audit. Sherlock customers get up to $500k of bug bounty and exploit coverage for the first month of launch after every audit.

Sherlock is also the only security provider to serve a customer’s full security needs, including collaborative audits, audit contests, bug bounties, and coverage. 

Sherlock’s audit contests combine the best of traditional auditing with a competitive twist that results in hundreds of eyes looking at the codebase and some of the best security experts in the world surfacing issues that traditional audits miss. 

Sherlock is the leader in auditing, running more public audits than any other provider last year. The Ethereum Foundation, Aave, Optimism, Cosmos, MakerDAO (now Sky) and the biggest crypto teams in the world choose Sherlock for their security needs.

Join Sherlock’s elite team on the ground floor, backed by some of the best Web3 and Silicon Valley VC firms such as Alliance, Archetype, IDEO, CoinFund, Lattice, Spartan, A Capital, and many others. 

Sherlock's Culture

Sherlock's culture is fast-moving, intense, and not right for everyone. Here are some common attributes among historically successful team members at Sherlock:

Mission-focus

Anyone in this for reasons other than creating the best financial coordination mechanism in history will either get too demotivated to last through multi-year bear markets or get too distracted during the frothy bull markets.

Willingness to work long, hard and smart

If Sherlock has any advantage, it is the willingness to work harder and think with more discipline than anyone else. This includes thinking from first principles about all important decisions and always thinking in tradeoffs and bets. 

Owner mentality

Team members get ownership in Sherlock after a short time in this role, and each is expected to act like an owner of a Michelin-star restaurant where no detail is too small.

Builder mentality

Everyone at Sherlock is deep in the arena getting their hands dirty and this is a vulnerable position. There are no pure "idea people" or pure managers at Sherlock; everyone is in execution mode first and foremost.

Customer focus

It is too easy to sit behind a computer and build in an echo chamber. We must go out of our way to experience the customer's viewpoint as often as possible.

Professional athlete mentality

Professional athletes opt in to a high-performance, meritocratic culture. This creates an environment that brings out the best in people and rewards each for their respective performance. But it's also an environment where being in the 70th percentile in your role means you will have a short tenure on the team. 

Comfort with directness and transparency

You must be comfortable giving direct feedback to others and receiving direct feedback yourself. "Not ruffling feathers" comes at the expense of moving in a suboptimal direction for too long. Sherlock is extremely transparent internally (and with customers) which means you can get involved in decisions made in any part of Sherlock.

The Role

Sherlock is already one of the leaders in blockchain security. But we’re looking to push the space forward further. Your role will be to contribute to the development of an exciting new initiative inside Sherlock. 

This initiative will be spearheaded by the CTO of Sherlock directly, and other team members are some of the best in the world at what they do. It will be a small team of elite members working on a very interesting area of blockchain security. If you succeed, you’ll take on much of the new feature development for this initiative, with support from the CTO, Sherlock’s existing engineers and designers. 

We are looking for someone who gets excited about the impact they can make in a role. The pace will be fast and the responsibilities will be high. Experience with Sherlock’s existing frontend and backend tech stack is a requirement. As is a strong base of Solidity knowledge. If you're serious about applying for this job and you've read this far, please email jack at sherlock dot xyz with 4-sentence answers to each of these three questions: What is the biggest individual contribution you’ve ever made to a software project? What gets you out of bed and excites you? Why should Sherlock select you over hundreds of other applicants?

Your role is to take on the highest impact position in a new initiative at Sherlock alongside a small team of elite players. In terms of the skills required in your role, a strong understanding of Python, Typescript and Solidity is a must. You’ll be responsible for full-stack development of features using Python in the backend, Typescript in the frontend, React and NextJS frameworks. You’ll be building an application related to Solidity smart contract security, so a strong understanding of Solidity is also required.

Any understanding of Solidity security vulnerabilities is a plus, but not a requirement for the role. 

The day-to-day responsibilities of this role include:

- Building features in an enterprise-grade application using Python (backend), Typescript (frontend), React and NextJS (10x weight)

- Understanding the user requirements of a Solidity developer and building based on their feedback (7x weight)

- Taking product direction from the CTO and working alongside designers (7x weight)

- Being extremely hungry/driven and ready to wear a different hat on any given day to help Sherlock succeed (5x weight)

Requirements

- Past experience building full-stack applications using Python (backend), Typescript (frontend), React and NextJS

- A strong understanding of Solidity smart contract development

- A strong interest in Solidity smart contract vulnerabilities

- A strong interest in AI applications and agentic workflows

Nice to Haves

- Past experience with Solidity smart contract development

- Past experience with Solidity smart contract vulnerability research

- Past experience with AI, LLMs, and/or building agentic workflows

What's in it for you

- Attractive base (payable in fiat or crypto) + material tokens/equity + benefits

- Flexible time-off policy

- Great healthcare

- Multiple offsites each year in places like France, Argentina, Thailand, etc.

- Be a huge contributor on a small elite team focused on an exciting area of blockchain security

- Root access to the decision-making process/criteria in all areas of Sherlock and the ability to work directly with the founders

- Move quickly and get stuff done on a small, elite team that has already made a big impact in the crypto space

- Play a huge role in defining the future of Sherlock and accomplishing the goal of making crypto/DeFi accessible to everyone