Ava Labs
Staff Backend Engineer, Institutional Custody
Remote$185,000 – $219,0006h ago
USD 155k-238k / year + Equity
Posted on Apr 14, 2026 Apply now Location
Remote (Global)
Full time
Compensation $155K – $238K • Offers Token and Equity Package
Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform.
We are looking for an Applied Cryptography Engineer to join the AvaCloud team at Ava Labs. AvaCloud is redefining how businesses launch, manage, and scale Web3 applications on Avalanche L1s. Our mission is to make blockchain simple, powerful, and accessible. The team has already helped leading organizations like J.P. Morgan Kinexys, FIFA, and Nexon’s MapleStory bring innovative products to market—and we’re just getting started.
Help design and extend the cryptographic backbone of our privacy-preserving protocols and infrastructure. You’ll work end-to-end—from research and design through high-performance implementation and production hardening—partnering closely with protocol, infrastructure, and research teams. This role is a great fit for an applied-minded generalist who turns cryptographic theory into robust, production-ready implementations for blockchain privacy and security.
What you’ll do
Research to design: Help the team to track the state of the art and translate relevant ideas into concrete specs, RFCs, and threat models tailored to our stack.
Design secure primitives & protocols: Build commitment schemes, authenticated data structures, threshold/key-management flows, and ZK circuits suited for high-throughput environments.
Implement production crypto: Write constant-time libraries in Go (preferred) or Rust; expose clean APIs; integrate with services where needed.
Engineer ZK proving systems: Shape circuits and arithmetizations; reduce constraints; tune proving pipelines.
Harden for adversarial settings: Perform threat modeling; add property-based tests, fuzzing, conduct rigorous reviews and assist external audits.
Integrate across the stack: Work with protocol and infra engineers to plug crypto components into networking, storage, key management, and (where relevant) smart-contract interfaces.
Measure & optimize: Profile, benchmark, and iterate on performance (concurrency, allocation patterns, cache behavior) with reproducible metrics and CI.
Document & communicate: Produce clear specifications and implementation notes; present trade-offs to engineers, researchers, auditors, and other stakeholders.
What you’ll bring
Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field.
Experience: 3+ years building and operating cryptographic systems in production.
Systems skills: Strong programming in Go or Rust (or similar systems languages), with attention to correctness, constant-time behavior, and safe concurrency.
Crypto depth: Solid theoretical and practical grounding—especially zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs, STARKs, Bulletproofs), privacy-preserving protocols, blockchain-specific implementations, and circuit design.
Communication: Clear writer/speaker who’s comfortable collaborating with internal teams and external partners (auditors, researchers, communities).
Learning mindset: Ability to absorb new technologies quickly and choose the right tool for the problem.
Mission focus: Passion for advancing privacy and security in decentralized technologies.
Nice to have
Hands-on or research experience in blockchain privacy, ZK systems, or closely related areas.
Familiarity with blockchain architectures and smart-contract platforms.
Experience with domain-specific circuit languages (e.g., Circom, Noir).
Contributions to open-source crypto libraries or peer-reviewed research.
Exposure to secure multi-party computation (MPC), homomorphic encryption, or post-quantum cryptography.
If you've ever thought about joining an early stage Web3 company - this is it! We're a global, world-class team of experts in computer science, economics, finance, marketing, and law with offices in New York City and Miami. We're highly passionate about Web3 and redefining the way people build and use finance and decentralized applications of all kinds. The company received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Join us and be a pioneer in a new technology that will have implications across a range of verticals such as finance, gaming, investing, collectibles, among many others.
Ava Labs is committed to diversity in the workplace and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
Compensation Range: $155K - $238K
Apply now See more open positions at Ava Labs