Frontend Engineer

Company

Prometheus Research Labs (PRL) is the team behind Poolside, an AMM for value-accruing assets and Buttonwood, a tranching protocol for liquidation-free debt.

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 focuses on composability; smart 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.

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 a new financial system, we must 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. We believe historically-tested primitives can 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.”

Buttonwood

Previous PRL projects include a liquidation-free debt protocol (Button Zero) and a double-sided auctions protocol (Button Auctions) under the Buttonwood brand. Other innovations built on top of Buttonwood include a flatcoin called SPOT built by Ampleforth and a convertible-debt market called HourGlass.

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).

Poolside

On existing AMMs, liquidity providers (LPs) suffer predictable losses for value-accruing tokens. This market is rapidly growing and includes the following: liquid staking derivatives (LSDs), real world assets (RWAs), rebasing commodities, appreciating collateral tokens, and vault shares.

After every value-accrual event, the swap ratio is mispriced and traders can arbitrage value out of the pool. Poolside solves for this by introducing a novel mechanism called reservoirs.

Tranche Stablecoin

This role will also help build a new tranche stablecoin collateralized by crypto assets that is liquidation-free.

About You

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

As a DeFi engineer, you will work on frontend development to create reusable and scalable UI-components for an ecosystem of dApps.

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.

Role

Responsibilities

  • Work on frontend improvements and help maintain our various protocols
  • Write robust test suites for web applications
  • Write specs and review PRs from teammates
  • Work with the team to design, deploy, and maintain highly usable user experiences
  • Stay up-to-date with the latest advancements in Ethereum and DeFi

Job Requirements

  • Strong experience writing React web applications
  • Strong communication and collaboration skills
  • Strong sense of ownership
  • Able to operate autonomously and transparently
  • Consistently able to deliver reliably within deadlines
  • Can rapidly iterate designs based on feedback
  • Interest or experience in open, decentralized, permissionless technologies, and the intersection of contemporary technology, economics, finance and governance.
  • Preferred: Willing to travel to Taiwan

Bonus

  • Familiarity with the dApp frontend stack (React, GraphQL/Apollo, Ethers, Metamask, etc.)
  • Experience writing modular, reusable component libraries
  • Familiarity with React Hooks
  • Experience with TypeScript in React
  • Experience with smart contracts and can read solidity code
  • Strong engagement with team members and active desire to contribute to vision
  • Enjoys interacting and building rapport with community
  • General knowledge and experience within the DeFi ecosystem: Active user of dApps, member of DAOs, etc.
  • General understanding of finance and tokenomics.
  • Preferred: Academic Degree in Computer Science or related discipline (Math/Stats/Physics/etc.)

Benefits

  • Competitive Salary (TBD based on experience)
  • Token Incentive Plan (TBD based on experience)
  • Comprehensive Insurance, flexible hours, unlimited vacation

How to apply

Please send an email to socks@prl.one with 100% of the following if you wish to be considered for this role:

  1. Resume / CV
  2. Git repo link
  3. LinkedIn or Twitter URL (or another profile)
  4. A short response to the following questions:
    • Which role(s) are you interested in?
    • When would you be ready to start?
    • What is your experience with Web3 and/or DeFi?
    • What is your experience writing smart contracts?
    • What is your experience with working with remote development teams?
    • Would you consider yourself deadline oriented?
    • What is your favorite Web3 protocol or Fintech application and why?
  5. How did you hear about us?