About CoW DAO

CoW DAO is on a mission to protect Ethereum users from MEV and optimize trade execution across DeFi. We achieve this through the CoW Protocol, CoW Swap (a leading intent-based DEX aggregator), and the innovative MEV Blocker, which together help secure, aggregate, and route trades for optimal outcomes. We also fund values-aligned projects via the CoW Grants Program.

CoW Protocol is consistently ranked among the top DEX aggregators by monthly volume and is the largest intent-based exchange. Our MEV Blocker protects trades from harmful MEV extraction and is integrated across the Ethereum ecosystem. The CoW AMM is the only live AMM designed to protect liquidity providers from LVR (loss-versus-rebalancing).

With over 100 open-source repositories on GitHub, we’re transparent, community-driven, and deeply committed to the open-source ethos. Our real-time Dune Analytics dashboard showcases billions in cumulative trading volume and a rapidly growing user base. As we continue to scale, CoW DAO remains at the forefront of DeFi innovation, prioritizing security, efficiency, and decentralization.

Learn more

About the role

Location: We are a fully remote team, and although we hire almost globally, there is a preference for this role to be based in Europe or remote +/- 4 hours CEST time

Please note we’re not hiring from the US, Australia, or New Zealand

Position: Full-time contractor

We need a Site Reliability Engineer who’s hungry for impact, loves building things from scratch, and enjoys keeping critical infrastructure running like a well-oiled machine. You’ll be working with a team that values autonomy, ownership, and a growth mindset—if that sounds like you, keep reading! 🚀

What You’ll Do

• Keep things running smoothly – You’ll build, maintain, and optimize our Kubernetes workloads while ensuring scalable, resilient cloud infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code
• Build cool stuff – Automate deployments, reduce tech debt, and optimize AWS costs to improve infrastructure efficiency
• Shape the future of DevOps at CoW – Drive CI/CD workflow standards, contribute to platform architecture & security, and enhance on-call and postmortem processes to foster a strong DevOps culture
• Strengthen our blockchain infrastructure – Deploy and manage Ethereum nodes & validators, establish SLAs, and ensure high availability across our network
• Own reliability metrics – Establish SLIs/SLOs for our solver competition, RPCs, and trades; build and manage error budgets with stakeholders
• Lead operational excellence – Rotate with the on-call team, lead blameless retrospectives, and automate runbooks to continuously improve resilience
• Teach and share – We love knowledge sharing! Be ready to collaborate, mentor, and even lead a small presentation for the team
• Automate and optimize – Modify and extend Pulumi configurations for AWS, fine-tune deployments, and continuously improve alerting solutions
• Enhance observability & security – Improve logging architecture, security measures, and database health to ensure reliable infrastructure performance

Our Tech Stack

• Our SRE Stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Pulumi, Flux, Ansible, OpenSearch, Nginx, Prometheus, Grafana, Docker and Linux
• Blockchain Nodes: Erigon, Reth, Nitro

Who You Are

• Kubernetes Mastery – You’ve deployed and maintained production-grade K8s clusters before
• Cloud & DevOps Expertise – Strong experience with AWS, CI/CD, Docker, and Linux
• Blockchain Expertise? Even Better! – Experience running Ethereum nodes (or other blockchain infra) is a plus.
• On-Call Ready – You’re comfortable handling incidents and making sure things don’t break (or fixing them fast if they do!)
• Monitoring Pro – You know your way around Prometheus, Grafana, and Elasticsearch
• Database Knowledge – We use Postgres, but any database experience is a plus
• Coding Background – You’ve written production-level code in Python, Go, Rust, or similar for at least 1-2 years
• Team Player & Communicator – We’re a remote team, so documentation, knowledge sharing, and collaboration are key

What We Can Offer You

• Impact & Ownership – Your work will directly shape the future of DeFi.
• Flexibility – Remote-friendly with the option to join our Lisbon hub
• Token Plan – Be part of our mission and shape the future of CoW DAO
• Team Gatherings – Regular meetups & off-sites retreats to connect IRL.
• Well-being Learning Budget – We support your growth, mental health, active life style
• Hardware Budget – Get the setup you need to Moo 🐮

Ready to Join the Herd?

Hit that apply button and let’s chat! 🚀

Referral Program

Earn 5.000 USDC or USD with the refer-to-earn program. More details here.

Culture

Life within the CoW Protocol is an incredible adventure! We take pride in our collaborative approach, embracing autonomy and fostering a culture of big thinking and continuous growth. We value impact, ownership, simplicity, and team spirit. Plus, we’re all about feedback, coming together, and enjoying the journey along the way!

At CoW Protocol, we strive to create a space where everyone feels included and empowered. We believe that our products and services benefit from our diverse backgrounds and experiences. All qualified applicants are considered for positions regardless of race, ethnic origin, age, religion or belief, marital status, gender identification, sexual orientation, or physical ability.

About the Role

As a Protocol Research Engineer at Raiku, you’ll dive deep into Solana’s consensus mechanisms, validator dynamics, and block-building edge cases to help push the boundaries of what’s possible on-chain. Your work will directly inform and evolve Raiku’s infrastructure — including ahead-of-time auctions, deterministic inclusion, and decentralized execution environments.

This role is ideal for an engineer who obsesses over protocol-level behavior, from slashing conditions and fork choice rules to novel token incentive structures and inclusion guarantees. You will collaborate closely with our core engineering team, lead technical research deep-dives, and shape future SIMD proposals and Raiku-native designs.

Core Responsibilities

Protocol Research & Development

• Analyze Solana protocol changes (SIMDs) and model their impact on consensus, block production, and validator incentives.
• Explore alternative leader schedules, transaction scheduling policies, and failure recovery mechanisms.
• Design and prototype changes to Raiku’s validator sidecar, ackermann-node, and execution environment logic.

Incentives & Economics

• Simulate and reason about token-level economics (e.g. fee markets, slot auctions, stake redistribution) in the context of Raiku’s architecture.
• Collaborate with the team on reward structures that align validators, apps, and execution primitives.
• Contribute to internal tooling for simulating validator behavior under new fee models or coordination layers.

Research & Thought Leadership

• Write internal memos and public-facing research exploring protocol edge cases, inclusion determinism, and priority fee market design.
• Lead technical discussions and workshops across the team and ecosystem partners.
• Represent Raiku in upstream governance and protocol forums (e.g., GitHub SIMDs, community calls).

What We’re Looking For

• Deep understanding of Solana’s architecture, consensus algorithm (Tower BFT), and validator mechanics.
• Proficiency in systems programming (Rust or C++) and experience working with validator or node clients (Agave, Jito, etc.).
• Comfort reasoning about distributed systems, forks, slashing, transaction lifecycle, and fee markets.
• Demonstrated ability to write clear, technical research — either internal design docs or public content.
• A rigorous, systems-level thinker who thrives in ambiguity and wants to help shape the frontier of internet-scale consensus.

Bonus Points

• Experience contributing to SIMD proposals or L1 protocol development (Solana, Cosmos, Ethereum, etc.).
• Familiarity with execution environments (SVM, EVM, Move) or decentralized scheduling infrastructure.
• Interest in MEV mitigation, slot auctions, or validator tokenomics.
• Past experience in distributed systems research, zero-knowledge design, or compiler/runtime engineering.

Why Join Raiku?

Raiku is building a high-performance execution layer atop Solana that enables guaranteed transaction inclusion, pre-confirmations, and slot-level coordination — unlocking a new design space for ultra-reliable onchain apps. We’re backed by leading investors, deeply technical, and shipping fast.

• Work with a world-class engineering team building core infrastructure from first principles.
• Help define the next evolution of block production and validator coordination on Solana.
• Remote-first, async culture optimized for focus, ownership, and velocity.
• Competitive salary + meaningful token upside.
• Home office and workstation setup stipend.

*About CoW DAO

CoW DAO is on a mission to protect Ethereum users from the dangers of DeFi. It does this by supporting the development of CoW Protocol, CoW Swap, MEV Blocker, and CoW AMM, and by funding values-aligned projects through the CoW Grants Program.

CoW Protocol is the second-largest DEX aggregator by monthly volume and the first-largest intents-based exchange. MEV Blocker is currently involved in ~4% of all Ethereum transactions, making it the category leader. CoW AMM is the only live AMM that protects LPs from LVR (loss-versus rebalancing).

As a member of CoW DAO’s core team, you will have the opportunity to shape these essential products, and contribute to the Ethereum ecosystem more broadly.

About the role**

Location: We are a fully remote team, and although we hire almost globally, there is a preference for this role to be based in Europe or remote +/- 4 hours CEST time

Please note we’re not hiring from the US, Australia, or New Zealand.

Position: Full-time contractor

We are looking for an enthusiastic, self-motivated, Senior Backend Engineer to help us build the next generation of decentralised trading protocols. As a dedicated backend engineer, you will gain ownership of our existing backend services and influence the creation, design, and execution of future features and products. You will work on technically challenging aspects of our off-chain services and our developer-facing APIs and help ensure the delivery of reliable and performant features to improve CoW Protocol.

Our Tech Stack

• Backend Code: Rust, Tokio, Cargo, Git (https://github.com/cowprotocol/services)
• Infrastructure: Pulumi, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch
• Other codebases: Typescript, Python, Solidity

What you will do

• Architect and design our off-chain services (core auction protocol as well as the orderbook) to support feature growth and the rapidly changing requirements that come from being an application on a constantly evolving blockchain.
• While your focus will be writing concurrent backend systems in Rust, you will also interact with our Smart Contracts written in Solidity and develop your understanding of auction mechanisms and DeFi protocols
• Participate in our on-call rotation to help ensure the reliability of our production systems (on-call work is additionally compensated)
• Work closely with researchers and the product team to ship features and come up with new solutions for challenging technical problems
• Deliver high-quality code for features from concept until production (including state-of-the-art monitoring of our production systems)
• Give thoughtful and in-depth code reviews of your colleagues’ contributions to our open-source codebase

Who you are

• You have 5+ years of production experience with systems-level programming languages, with at least 1+ year of hands-on production experience using Rust
• You have practical experience working in web3 (ideally in DeFi and the Ethereum ecosystem)
• You have excellent computer science, programming, and algorithmic skills
• Experience with operating, maintaining, and architecting complex software systems
• You care deeply about the quality, readability, observability, and testability of your code
• You proactively give technical direction to improve performance, prevent issues, optimise data usage, and refactor the codebase
• You are a team player, strong communicator, and gladly share your expertise with others
• You collaborate effectively with a remote-first team on a large, open-source codebase
• Ideally, someone senior who can mentor colleagues and provide direction.
• You are excited to explore and gain experience with Ethereum

What we can offer you

• Flexible work environment: Join our hub in Lisbon or work remotely
• Token plan: Have a stake in our mission and shape the future of CoW DAO
• Periodic gatherings: Enjoy opportunities to connect with the rest of the team through regular trips
• Conference allocation: Stay up-to-date with ecosystem advancements using our conference budget
• Learning budget: Use our learning budget to support your higher ambitions
• Hardware budget: Take advantage of a hardware budget for acquiring necessary equipment
• Make an impact: You are joining a startup where you can make a huge difference. Your work matters!
• Flat hierarchies mean fewer processes and bureaucracy - see more of your ideas come to life!
• Flexible work and vacation times: Prioritize work-life balance through our robust flexible work policy and vacation allowance
• Growth: If you’re someone who loves taking the initiative and getting things done, CoW offers lots of opportunities for your individual growth

Referral Program

Earn 6.000 USDC or USD with the refer-to-earn program. More details here.

Culture

Life within the CoW Protocol is an incredible adventure! We take pride in our collaborative approach, embracing autonomy and fostering a culture of big thinking and continuous growth. We value impact, ownership, simplicity, and team spirit. Plus, we’re all about feedback, coming together, and enjoying the journey along the way!

At CoW Protocol, we strive to create a space where everyone feels included and empowered. We believe that our products and services benefit from our diverse backgrounds and experiences. All qualified applicants are considered for positions regardless of race, ethnic origin, age, religion or belief, marital status, gender identification, sexual orientation, or physical ability.