PvP Trade - Smart Contract Engineer

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