Staff/Senior Security Engineer - DeFi

About the role

This role focuses on securing Ethena Labs' digital dollar products, such as USDe and iUSDe, which have rapidly scaled in the DeFi space. The work involves taking ownership of the security infrastructure for wallets and custodian accounts, ensuring the integrity of transactions and the safety of digital assets. This includes designing signing regimes, managing canonical address allowlists, and continuously upgrading security measures.

A key part of this position is operating and refining real-time monitoring across various financial instruments and integrating these systems with incident response workflows. The engineer will also conduct independent technical reviews of new protocol integrations, keeping a current risk register, and verifying ERC-20 approval hygiene across the treasury. This ensures proactive identification and mitigation of potential vulnerabilities.

Success in this role means maintaining a robust security posture for Ethena's foundational infrastructure, which supports a global financial system. The engineer will be responsible for producing high-quality documentation of controls, tooling, and decisions for auditors and institutional partners, demonstrating a commitment to rigorous verification and clear communication of technical risks to diverse stakeholders.

The listed salary range for this position is between $112,000 and $188,000 USD.

Skills that matter here

• Solidity: The role requires mastery of Solidity to read and understand arbitrary smart contracts and raw calldata.
• EVM: Deep understanding of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is necessary for analyzing contract behavior and security implications.
• Gnosis Safe: Practical experience with Gnosis Safe is essential for managing multi-signature wallets and securing assets.
• Coinbase Prime: Experience with Coinbase Prime is needed for understanding and securing institutional custodian accounts.
• DeFi protocols: Strong knowledge of DeFi protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Stargate is required to assess risk parameters and integration security.
• Fireblocks: Familiarity with Fireblocks is important for managing and securing digital asset operations.

Who this role suits

• A security professional who approaches environments with a default assumption of hostility and is energized by rigorous verification.
• Someone who can clearly articulate complex technical risks to non-technical audiences, including executives and auditors.
• An individual who is a self-starter, comfortable taking full ownership of infrastructure, and capable of producing audit-grade documentation.
• A practitioner with deep technical expertise in blockchain security and DeFi, capable of analyzing complex smart contracts and operational flows.

From the employer

What You’ll Do:

• Own the end-to-end design of our signing regime, including signer composition, thresholds, and intent communication, and continue evolving our pre-signature verification workflows for destination, calldata, and state-change confirmation.
• Manage, maintain and continuously upgrade canonical address and contract allowlist system and infra that manages it, ensuring every whitelisting or approval action is checked against this list pre-signature, requiring documented review for any additions.
• Operate and tighten real-time monitoring across wallets, custodians, and DeFi positions, keep it integrated with our SOC 2 incident-response workflows, and contribute to playbooks for evolving risk scenarios.
• Run independent technical reviews of new protocol integrations and keep our risk register current as positions and dependencies evolve.
• Continuously verify ERC-20 approval hygiene across the treasury, and partner with Finance on automated reconciliation between on-chain activity and accounting systems.
• Own the process of producing the documentation of controls, tooling, and decisions that our auditors, underwriters, and institutional counterparties expect.

What We’re Looking For:

• Mastery of Solidity and the EVM; you can read arbitrary contracts and raw calldata without assistance. You are fluent in tools such as Tenderly, Foundry-based simulation, and trace analysis.
• Deep practical experience with Gnosis Safe, Coinbase Prime, Anchorage, and Fireblocks. Strong understanding of the operational failure modes inherent in browser-based custodian extensions and hardware wallet signing flows.
• Strong practitioner-level knowledge of DeFi protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Stargate. You understand risk parameters, oracle structures, and bridge message-passing mechanics.
• A security-first mindset that assumes a hostile environment by default. You possess a "vigilance disposition" - you are energized by rigorous verification and are committed to maintaining safety standards even when facing operational pressure.
• Proven ability to explain technical risks to non-technical stakeholders (COO team, executives, auditors). You are a self-starter comfortable owning infrastructure end-to-end and producing high-quality, audit-grade documentation.

Why Ethena Labs?

• You'd be joining a group that has well established itself as one of the most successful crypto-native company's of all time, a group with a mission to revolutionise decentralised finance and it's position in global finance.
• Work alongside a passionate and innovative team that values collaboration and creativity.
• Enjoy a flexible, remote-friendly work environment with established opportunities for personal growth and learning.