Engineering Lead — Security

About Somnia SOMNIA is the Agentic Chain - a hyper-performance L1 operating at an order of magnitude faster than existing networks. We empower builders and traders to create real-time, autonomous, and fully decentralized products, powered by agents, that were previously impossible and cannot be built anywhere else. It’s where the future of Web3 protocols will be built, so we’re facilitating a new wave of on-chain applications from DEX to Prediction Protocols and much, much more. Somnia is being developed by Somnia Foundation backed by Improbable https://www.improbable.io/, a British tech Unicorn +++ that has been at the forefront of building virtual worlds for over a decade. Somnia received initial funding from MSquared https://www.msquared.io/, which raised $150 million https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220407005101/en/Improbable-Raises-US150m-to-Establish-M%C2%B2-MSquared-a-Metaverse-Network-and-Ecosystem-Powered-by-Its-Morpheus-Technology from a16z crypto, SoftBank, Mirana Ventures, CMT Digital, and SIG.

About the Role

Key Responsibilities

• Work with the other technical leaders to help define the engineering culture and bar.
• Own the security posture of the L1 infrastructure—validators, RPC, signing services, supporting systems. Harden hosts, networks, and pipelines; drive vulnerability management, patching, and security monitoring.
• Define and roll out the policies and standards that govern the organization—access control, secrets management, secure SDLC, change management, compliance-readiness.

• Drive application and supply-chain security for what Somnia ships—secure-by-default patterns, dependency and build-pipeline scanning in CI, and security reviews where the stakes are highest. That includes the agentic workflow itself: the permissions and provenance of agent-authored changes.

• Design and operate multisig governance, signing ceremonies, and the key lifecycle (generation, storage, rotation, recovery) for treasury, upgrades, and privileged ops. No single points of failure; everything auditable.
• Build and lead the security incident-response capability—detection, triage, containment, blameless postmortems—and run tabletops, from a compromised laptop to a live protocol exploit, so the team is ready before an incident, not during one.
• Stay hands-on—threat modeling, security reviews, and red-team exercises—and coordinate external audits and bug bounties to raise the bar company-wide.
• Work with the infrastructure and L1 teams so that node and validator operations resist compromise and upgrades ship safely.

Requirements

• Hands-on securing and operating production systems—Linux internals, networking, containers/Kubernetes, IaC.
• Track record defining and implementing security policies an engineering org actually adopts.
• Key management at depth: signing workflows, HSMs, secrets management, key generation/rotation/recovery.
• Strong incident response leadership: detection, containment, forensics, postmortems.
• Cryptography fundamentals as applied to blockchain and key management.
• Senior-level ownership and judgment; clear communication and the ability to influence without authority.
• Comfortable in high-stakes environments.

• Genuine interest in crypto and on-chain systems. Nice to Have - Securing blockchain L1/L2 node and validator infrastructure.
• Multisig governance and treasury operations in production.
• EVM, smart contract security, and DeFi attack surfaces (MEV, bridges, oracles).
• Coordinating external audits, bug bounties, and responsible disclosure.
• Red teaming, offensive security, or detection engineering.
• High-throughput or low-latency systems where security can't compromise performance.

• Ownership and autonomy:A lean team that optimizes for individual impact and velocity.

• Outcome-oriented: We take on hard technical problems, but the tech is always a means to an end. What matters is what ships and the impact it has, not cleverness for its own sake.
• Best tool for the job: We solve interesting problems in the simplest way possible.

• Show concrete blockchain security contributions: Fork a high‑profile open‑source security tool (e.g., OpenZeppelin Defender, Slither, or Certora), submit a pull request that adds a performance‑aware check (like gas‑optimized re‑entrancy detection), and include the PR link and any measurable impact (e.g., “reduced false‑positive rate by 22%”). This demonstrates both security depth and alignment with Somnia’s focus on hyper‑performance L1.
• Create a performance‑oriented threat model for a validator layer: Draft a 1‑page threat model that maps out attack vectors on consensus, state‑sync, and agent‑execution pipelines, then propose mitigations that leverage low‑latency Rust/Go primitives (e.g., SIMD‑accelerated BLS signatures). Bring this to the interview and be ready to walk through your assumptions and trade‑offs.
• Bundle a “real‑time audit” case study: Pick a recent public L1 or DeFi protocol, run a full audit using tools like MythX, Echidna, and a custom fuzz harness written in Rust, and present the results in a concise slide deck (scope, findings, performance impact of fixes, and timeline). Highlight how you kept the audit under a tight deadline while preserving throughput—key for Somnia’s autonomous agents.
• Demonstrate remote security leadership: Prepare a brief incident‑response runbook that shows how you’d coordinate async teams across time zones using Slack/Discord, Notion for runbooks, Linear for ticket triage, and GitHub Actions for automated post‑mortem reporting. Share a screenshot or excerpt in your portfolio to prove you can lead a distributed security org effectively.
• Negotiate with token‑aligned compensation: Research recent security‑lead offers at Web3 firms (base $250‑300k + 0.5‑2% token grants) and prepare a one‑pager that ties a performance‑based equity schedule to Somnia’s token economics (e.g., vesting accelerated on achieving zero‑critical‑vuln milestones). Present this during the offer stage to secure a package that reflects both market rates and Somnia’s on‑chain growth incentives.