Protocol Security Researcher (DeFi)

Location: London, England; Remote in Europe, Asia, or the US. Workplace: Hybrid.

Company

Builds the Aave Protocol, an onchain lending market connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech.

What you will do

• Review major Aave protocol changes before external audits or deployment.
• Perform attacker-driven analysis of smart contracts, protocol mechanisms, integrations, and adjacent infrastructure.
• Contribute to design and architecture discussions and influence security-relevant decisions.
• Identify risks in assets, bridges, oracles, adapters, and other critical dependencies.
• Develop and evaluate AI-assisted security tooling for real review workflows.
• Translate findings into reusable knowledge, invariants, testing, monitoring, and incident-response requirements while collaborating with external auditors.

Requirements

• 5+ years of relevant security experience.
• Strong background in smart contract security and the ability to independently review complex codebases.
• Strong understanding of DeFi mechanisms, including lending, liquidations, accounting, oracles, collateral, governance, and integrations.
• Ability to reason about protocol-level failure modes and explain how issues could be exploited.
• Active use of AI to improve security research, review quality, or review throughput.
• Clear written communication and sound judgment regarding severity, exploitability, and trade-offs.

Nice to have

• Experience with formal methods, fuzzing, invariant testing, or custom security tooling.
• Experience building internal tools for security review, code understanding, or knowledge management.
• Experience working with external audit firms or leading audit engagements.
• Familiarity with governance payloads, upgrade systems, permissioning, and incident response.
• Open-source security research, published findings, CTFs, bug bounties, or public vulnerability research.

Culture & Benefits

• Global team focused on building trusted and reliable financial products.
• High standards for quality, craftsmanship, and attention to detail.
• Lean, focused teams with fast execution and long-term thinking.
• Equal-opportunity workplace that values diversity, safety, and individual identity.