What are the responsibilities and job description for the PvP Trade - Smart Contract Engineer position at deCircle?
Company Overview
PVP is building the next generation of DeFi trading powered by Hyperliquid. Our mission is to democratize access to global financial markets by leveraging decentralized technologies. We are the largest builder-coded product on Hyperliquid, having processed over $50B in cumulative trading volume and generating eight figures in revenue in the past year.
We are a small, highly technical team of strong individual contributors, passionate about free markets and building ambitious systems from the ground up. We value autonomy, ownership, and rapid execution. Our culture is low-process, high-trust, and results-driven—ideal for self-starters who thrive in ambiguous, 0-to-1 environments.
Role Overview
We are seeking a Protocol Infrastructure Engineer who can work across low-level Solidity optimizations and distributed backend system design for trading-scale throughput. In this role, you will lead the design, implementation, and deployment of smart contracts on HyperEVM, building DeFi primitives and trading infrastructure capable of supporting millions of traders and billions in daily volume.
Responsibilities
Own protocol development on HyperEVM, including the design, implementation, and deployment of production-grade smart contracts powering positions, collateral management, fee routing, and settlement flows
Architect DeFi primitives end-to-end, such as staking and locking mechanisms, liquidity and fee systems, vaults, and risk controls (circuit breakers, caps, kill-switches, guardians), with explicit gas and latency budgets
Design and implement safe upgradeability strategies (UUPS, transparent, beacon), including storage-layout testing and invariant preservation through migrations and staged rollouts
Lead security and correctness efforts by modeling MEV and price-manipulation threats, writing invariants and fuzz tests (Foundry, Echidna), integrating static analysis tools (Slither), managing audit scope and responses, and owning post-mortems
Drive operational excellence by defining on-chain SLOs, emitting analytics-ready events, building monitoring and alerting systems, and owning incident response, rollback, and patch runbooks
Protocol & Smart Contract Engineering
Strong experience designing and optimizing Solidity smart contracts
Deep understanding of DeFi protocol design, primitives, and risk mechanisms
Experience with smart-contract upgradeability patterns and safe contract migrations
Security & Testing
Proven experience with smart contract security and threat modeling, including MEV and price-manipulation vectors
Hands-on experience with invariant testing, fuzzing, and static analysis tools
Infrastructure & Systems
Ability to design and reason about distributed backend systems at trading-scale throughput
Experience building systems with strict latency, reliability, and availability constraints
Ownership mindset when operating production systems, including monitoring and incident response