About the job

About Protocol Labs

Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. Protocol Labs is a product-development lab, but behind the protocols and tools we build, behind the research and implementations, are passionate people, teammates and community members. Most teams in the Protocol Labs Network are fully distributed and work remotely around the world. Engineers, researchers, and operators work in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances at the intersection of many exciting fields (crypto, networks, distributed systems) and cultures (startups, research, open source, distributed work).

We seek a Developer Productivity Engineer who will design and build products to empower Protocol Labs’ engineering team and our open source collaborators to deliver more, faster, and safer.

Protocol Labs is an open-source research, development, and deployment laboratory. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and many more. We aim to make human existence orders of magnitude better through technology. We are a fully distributed company. Our team of more than 100 members works remotely and in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances in computing and related fields.

As a Developer Productivity Engineer for Protocol Labs, you’ll be one of the first in a newly formed Developer Productivity Team. You will own the design, development, implementation, and support of products that create a solid and stable foundation for our open source developers with satisfying automation, tooling, and defaults. We’re moving fast, and the season is ripe for “builder tools” to enhance our productivity.

Your customers are other Protocol Labs engineers and their open source collaborators. They will have ideas of problems that stand in their way of fully shipping software. They want to work with an expert who can build tools that make them more productive. In addition to meeting their communicated needs, you’ll use your “nose for efficiency” to identify/propose/build solutions on their behalf that makes their life better.

As a Developer Productivity Engineer at Protocol Labs, you will...

• Learn about the ins and outs of the Protocol Labs developer ecosystem.
• Develop open-sourced products for Labbers and our collaborators that are fully documented, tested, monitored, and supported.
• Innovate to bring the capabilities and efficiencies traditionally gained by closed source and monorepos to modular, natively open-source projects.
• Automate dependency management and analysis across our 500+ GitHub repositories.
• Establish and support conventions and mechanisms around build systems, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.
• Develop a program around release automation for our libraries, modules, browser extensions, and desktop applications.
• Create tooling for GitHub issues and PR management at scale.
• Support advanced automated testing across GitHub organizations.
• Design and develop inspection and analysis tools supporting PL's novel data structures (IPLD) and decentralized protocols (Libp2p, IPFS, Filecoin).
• Inform the broader org on the industry trends in automation and build/release management.
  
  

You may be a fit for this role if you have....

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, related field or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building internal or external products with high ownership across the product (e.g., docs, support, metrics).
• Experience positively impacting other teams’ productivity. (Whether through automating, simplifying, or empowering, we want team members who get deep satisfaction out of making others more productive.)
• A strong bend for simplicity and consistency.
• A “nose” for anticipating and identifying problems that impede customers’ velocity without being told or asked.
• Awareness when teammates rely on “best intentions” in their software development workflow and instead find ways to neutralize them with process changes or technology.
• Familiarity with Golang. At the minimum, the willingness and ability to learn it.
• Experience with process automation (e.g., GitHub Apis, GitHub Actions).
• A proven track record of independently driving projects in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills on both technical and non-technical issues.
• Keen awareness of teamwork, process, and patterns of successful collaboration.
  
  

Bonus Points

• Tooling spanning multiple GitHub organizations and repos.
• Building tooling at different levels from centrally-run/managed scripts to fully managed web applications.
• Cloud platforms and how to leverage them for DevOps/automation.
• JavaScript and modern web frameworks (e.g., React).
• 3rd party build systems (e.g., CircleCI).
• Code signing tools.
  
  

What’s it like to work at Protocol Labs?

Protocol Labs mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more.

As a distributed team, we hire anywhere in the world, and at various levels of experience (entry, senior, staff). We look for people with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds.

We have a great benefits package, including parental leave, contributions to your retirement, competitive pay, and unlimited time off. For U.S.-based employees, we also provide platinum-level health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.

If you’re passionate about the future of computing and a more democratized internet, we want to talk to you.