Staff Software Engineer, Bitkey

Job Description
Bitkey sits within the Proto team. Proto's purpose is to accelerate the world’s transition to a more open economy by making products that increase access and independence for everyone. The first two initiatives we’ve identified that represent the biggest impact to this purpose are in the Bitcoin space with Bitcoin mining and Bitkey, a self custody Bitcoin wallet. While we’re starting there, we don’t believe the need for tools to increase one’s independence is limited to bitcoin or the financial space. One principle across everything we do in Proto is open development – show and tell. We develop products in the open, you can read more about them at and .
We are looking to hire an engineer to help our team optimize for finding product market fit in a technically complex environment. A successful candidate has worked in a variety of technical lead capacities and is curious to solve problems no matter where they are in the software stack. While Bitcoin or cryptographic expertise is a significant bonus, it is not a requirement of this role. It is a requirement to be passionate about this burgeoning technology and for the candidate to have a history of being successful in ambiguous or zero-to-one environments. This role will be crucial to product development and will collaborate across a variety of disciplines.
The person who takes this role will help us continue to refine our architecture from first principles, help define engineering best practices and will leverage their expertise to help us build new products around Bitcoin. It's just as important that this person help us figure out what not to spend time on - and with this in mind, the wrong hire in this role could be worse than no hire at all. The scope is wide -- nothing is off-limits and whoever is in this role will need to understand the whole product offering. This role is also hands-on -- we need someone who has the breadth to develop strategy and the depth to help realize it in practice.
This role requires heavy collaboration with all of our disciplines including mobile, server, web, firmware, and security and will be critical to improving the success of our engineers and overall product.
You Will
Develop primitives that we are able to share across multiple platforms
Architect our systems to be adaptive to our core primitives, solving for current problems of the product, while also keeping an eye on the future
Help develop the product roadmap in partnership with other stakeholders across business, marketing, product, design and legal
Maintain a high quality bar for our engineering team by ensuring we have the right visibility into tracing, metrics, logging, and alerting
Work with other Block bitcoin, foundational and security teams to develop strategies for how we leverage existing or build new tooling to support our products.
Be a champion for engineering excellence by improving our processes