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Protocol Engineering Lead

Cielo Projects Open · verified Oct 24, 2026
Hybrid New York Full-time Senior Engineering Leadership

At a glance

Senior Engineering Leadership role at Cielo Projects. New York · full-time · $175,000–$230,000 base.

SalaryStated by Cielo Projects
$175,000 – $230,000
Base salary for this role, in USD per year, as published in the posting.
This role, from Cielo ProjectsOur estimate for the market: $206,250–$273,725Median $233,750
Below the market median of $233,750 for senior engineering leadership roles in New York.
Worked out from 151 postings that stated pay, median $233,750. Last updated Oct 23, 2026.
RoleEngineering Leadership
SenioritySenior
LocationNew York
WorkplaceHybrid
EmploymentFull-time
Base pay$175,000–$230,000
PostedSep 25, 2026 · 4w ago
Role brief

techroles summary, based on the employer's posting.

What you'll do

  • Run the smart-contract release process and arrange an external audit for every release
  • Decide which Optimism upstream changes to adopt, retain or deliberately replace in your OP Stack fork
  • Explain unexpected chain behavior to reliability and security engineers, then to bank teams

What you bring

  • Deep Solidity and EVM experience with contracts that held real value and passed external audits
  • A practical grasp of rollup architecture, preferably the OP Stack
  • Experience maintaining a fork of a substantial upstream codebase and understanding its ongoing costs
  • You can make chain behavior clear to reliability engineers, security engineers and bank teams

Who this fits

This senior role suits a protocol engineer who has operated audited, value-bearing contracts and maintained an upstream fork. The position is based in New York and hybrid.

From the employer

We're partnering with Quant, a global leader in digital transformation and technology solutions, seeking a Platform Reliability Technical Lead to join their team.

About Quant:

Almost all the money in the economy is commercial bank money, and almost none of it moves on chain. Quant is a leading provider of programmable money infrastructure, and our technology changes that: it lets banks issue, move and settle tokenized deposits around the clock, automatically and securely, while staying connected to the systems they already run on. It is already deployed in regulated environments with central and commercial banks in the UK and around the world, including work on the digital pound and the digital euro.

The Clearing House, whose networks clear and settle more than $2 trillion a day, has now selected Quant to power its On-Chain Money Initiative: a new interoperable payments network that will let financial institutions of all sizes clear and settle tokenized deposits, with connectivity to the RTP® and CHIPS® networks. Our technology provides the network's interoperability, orchestration and transaction-management layer, enabling payments that settle immediately and transactions that trigger automatically once agreed conditions are met.

Through our Tokenized Deposits-as-a-Service solution, banks of any size can join without building new infrastructure themselves. The network is expected to become available to participating institutions in the first half of 2027, with use cases across corporate treasury, liquidity management, cross-border payments and digital asset settlement. We are building the New York team that will run it.

Protocol Engineering Lead

Most people who write smart contracts never have to keep them running afterward. This job is the other half.

The Clearing House has selected Quant to power its On-Chain Money Initiative, and the protocol work behind it, a permissioned EVM rollup on the OP Stack, is moving into production ahead of an expected launch in the first half of 2027. You would own the smart-contract release train, external audits on every release, and our diff against upstream Optimism: what we take, what we hold, and where we diverge on purpose.

You would also explain the chain's unexpected behavior to people who are not protocol engineers. The pool of people who can do this is small. If you are near the edge of it, apply.

You will need

  • Deep Solidity and EVM experience, on contracts that held real value and went through external audit.
  • Real understanding of rollup architecture, ideally the OP Stack. The mechanics rather than the vocabulary.
  • To have maintained a fork of a large upstream codebase, and to know what that costs over time.
  • To be able to explain chain behavior to reliability engineers, security engineers and eventually to a bank.

Useful, not essential

  • Permissioned or enterprise EVM deployments.
  • Settlement, payments or tokenization rather than consumer applications.
  • Public contributions. We will read them.

There is more to this than we can put in an advertisement. If it sounds like your kind of problem, apply and we will tell you the rest on a call.

Opportunity

Engineering Leadership work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Engineering Leadership$170k+

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.

Find me work
Opportunity

Engineering Leadership work from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Upwork, in one list.

Each morning you get everything that fits, strongest first.

Find me work

By the team behind techroles.