Forward Deployed Engineer at MatterLabs

About Matter Labs

Matter Labs develops advanced private cryptographic infrastructure, enabling regulated financial institutions to settle transactions directly with each other. This is achieved without compromising data privacy, relinquishing control, or enduring lengthy settlement periods. The global financial industry, which moves trillions annually, still relies on systems that are decades old. Matter Labs is at the forefront of building the next generation of financial infrastructure.

Our flagship product, Prividium, provides each institution with a private, independent environment, a Prividium Zone, complete with its own governance and built-in interoperability. This seamless interaction spans various counterparties, asset classes, and jurisdictions. Interoperability is powered by zero knowledge proofs, allowing parties to validate transactions without exposing underlying sensitive data. Prividium stands as the only private settlement infrastructure leveraging zero knowledge cryptography.

Established in 2018 and backed by prominent investors like a16z and Union Square Ventures, Matter Labs operates as a fully remote team of approximately 70 individuals. With eight years of production experience in zero knowledge infrastructure, the company is now tackling the most significant challenges in institutional finance.

The Role of a Forward Deployed Engineer

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be deeply embedded with our institutional clients. Your mission will be to guide Prividium from the initial signed deal to a live, operational chain within their complex environments. These institutions include banks, custodians, and clearing houses, moving substantial value on infrastructure often built decades ago. The solutions you deploy will become integral to their daily operations.

Requirements from these institutions are typically presented as descriptions of the legacy systems being replaced. This is common for large organizations, reflecting decades of accumulated regulation, audit trails, and control mandates. A crucial aspect of this role is dissecting these requirements to understand the fundamental obligations beneath them. You will then design robust, generalized solutions that satisfy these obligations, not just for the current customer but for future clients as well. Your recommendations will be presented to the customer's engineering teams for collaborative implementation.

Key Responsibilities: What You Will Do

• End to End Deployment Ownership: Take full responsibility for deployments, including integration code, permissioning, node topology, defining upgrade paths, and creating the operational runbooks for customer operations teams.
• Reference Application Development: Build critical reference applications that demonstrate specific use cases, covering areas like collateral movement, tokenized deposit transfers, and settlement flows.
• Production Support & Reliability: Participate in the on call rotation for Prividium and its supporting services. This includes responding to critical incidents and implementing preventative fixes to enhance system resilience.
• Strategic Collaboration: Work closely with the Head of Product and Head of Sales to identify high priority accounts for deep engagement, and with the core engineering team to transition successful deployments into the broader platform.

Successful candidates in this role prioritize shipping working solutions efficiently over extensive theoretical presentations. They can articulate their confidence in recommendations and identify factors that would alter their conclusions. A rare but highly valued trait is discerning the elegant, general solution within a complex set of constraints, distinguishing it from merely clever but less sustainable approaches.

Qualifications & Requirements

To excel in this role, candidates should possess:

• Proven experience owning and running production software, including participating in on call rotations.
• Strong coding proficiency in languages such as TypeScript or Rust, or deep fluency in comparable languages like Java, C#, Go, or Python with a demonstrated ability to quickly adapt to new technologies.
• Significant experience working within customer environments as a forward deployed engineer, solutions architect, or technical founder. Former founders are highly encouraged to apply.

We are hiring two individuals for this position and value depth in one of the following areas:

If You Come From Banking:

• Experience in building or integrating software for financial institutions or regulated financial infrastructure.
• Working knowledge of core banking platforms, custody and key management, identity and entitlements, ISO 20022 or similar messaging standards, and enterprise authentication and network architecture.
• Familiarity with risk, compliance, controls, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and procurement processes.
• No prior blockchain experience is required; we will provide comprehensive training on our stack.

If You Come From Crypto Infrastructure:

• Experience with Ethereum execution clients and understanding of node internals. Direct reth experience is a significant advantage.
• Proficiency in Rust for production environments, as it is central to node development.
• Comfortable operating chain infrastructure in production, including node topology, upgrades, synchronization and reorg behavior, and monitoring.
• Experience with Solidity or a strong aptitude to learn it quickly, coupled with a working understanding of rollup and bridging mechanics.
• Ability to clearly explain complex cryptographic trust guarantees to non technical audiences.

Work Model & Compensation

• Competitive Base Salary: We offer a strong base compensation package.
• Performance Based Incentives: Additional performance based variable compensation and a long term token incentive, both paid in ZK tokens. New hire token grants vest over four years with a one year cliff.
• Fully Remote: This is a fully remote position, requiring approximately 10 to 25 percent travel to customer sites, depending on assigned accounts.
• On Call Rotation: Participation in a shared on call rotation covering Prividium and our hosted services is required for everyone in this role.
• Time Zone Overlap: Our customers are primarily in North America and Europe, requiring working hour overlap with these time zones.