Engineer

About the role

WHAT IS COMMONWARE?

Today’s blockchain stack is designed to be a jack of all trades, but master of none. Modeled after virtual machines (VM) and kernels, it exposes a monolithic interface through a one-size-fits-all framework instead of molding to the needs of any specific application.

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At Commonware, we believe that the most popular onchain experiences of the next decade will develop a sustained edge through vertical integration. To accelerate developers that share this perspective, we are building a library of open (MIT/Apache-2) primitives https://github.com/commonwarexyz/monorepo meant to be remixed and modded.

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SETTING THE STAGE: 8 PEOPLE AND $30M+ RAISED

Backed by Haun Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Mert Mumtaz, Nick White, Dan Romero, Sreeram Kannan, and other experienced operators https://commonware.xyz/blogs/commonware-the-anti-framework.html, Commonware is now hiring for ambitious engineers that can help us expand the Commonware Library https://github.com/commonwarexyz/monorepo to a broader set of applications and support customers, like Tempo https://fortune.com/2025/11/07/stripe-paradigm-tempo-commonware-strategic-investment-25-million/, with novel infrastructure built for it.

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Today, we are a lean team of 8 focused on staying small, nimble, and accountable: Patrick O’Grady https://patrickogrady.xyz (Founder, ex-VP Engineering at Ava Labs, designed Coinbase Rosetta/Mesh), Brendan Chou https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanchou (First Hire and Head of Engineering at dYdX), Roberto Bayardo https://www.linkedin.com/in/roberto-bayardo-4339a0222 (Distinguished Engineer at Google and Coinbase), Dan Laine http://linkedin.com/in/daniel-laine (Engineer at Ava Labs), Lucas Meier https://cronokirby.com (Cryptographer at Penumbra Labs), Ben Clabby https://x.com/vex_0x (Engineer at Optimism), André Silva https://x.com/andrebeat (Consensus at Parity), Andrew Lewis-Pye https://lewis-pye.com (Researcher at LSE). We are spread around the globe but assemble at our new office in Palo Alto every few months to fill whiteboards and play arcade games.

THE ROLE

We don't hire engineers for specific tasks. We hire great people with differentiated experience in a specific area and expect them to direct their focus to the highest priority task.

At this time, we are looking for folks that have spent years building any of the following:

- Streaming unstructured data over globally distributed infrastructure

- Designing and testing onchain execution environments

- Optimizing cryptographic primitives (with math and assembly)