Souq was founded on one idea: The highest quality investments should be as freely accessible as information on the internet, and everyone should be able to invest in the best wealth generating assets. We’ve started with the best assets for the current global economic environment: investment-grade bonds and private credit. So far, have raised a $3.3m pre-seed financing to build this vision.

What we are building:

Problem

400m humans hold $1 trillion in crypto assets as a means to build wealth
Many of these people are new to investing, having recently ditched their hyperinflating fiat currencies for stablecoins
The current risk-on, high volatility, highly correlated asset mix within the crypto could not be a worse wealth generation mechanism for these retail investors

Solution

Souq is pioneering a global blockchain frontend to the fixed income market. Institutional Investors, DeFi Builders, and Retail are 1 click away from bond yield via highly composable crypto assets. Just like USDC, but the owner keeps the yield. While Institutional Investors and DeFi Builders will invest in bonds, Retail can participate via on-chain ETFs. Our founding team has decades of experience working with regulators, which we’ve leveraged to receive a first-of-its-kind regulatory approval to offer this product compliantly.

Bonds have metadata, therefore they must be NFTs for compliance. This requires new infrastructure, so we built, launched, and validated two protocols in the past 100 days. The first is our Bond DEX, an NFT AMM that achieved $136k in volume for one collection in a 2-month test market pilot. The second, our On-Chain ETF, which today provides sustainable yield and indexed token appreciation exposure to the top revenue-generating Arbitrum protocols, but tomorrow will be used to package bonds into baskets with superior risk vs return than any existing crypto asset today.

We are looking for an experienced blockchain engineer to help us build the first generation of our bond tokenization technology, as well as advance our Bond DEX and On-Chain ETF products. You will be responsible for leading the architecture and implementation of critical smart contracts, as well as integrating them with on-chain oracles (DeFi and TradFi data streams) and other DeFi protocols in order to power the EVM’s bond market.

What You'll Do

Lead architecture and implementation of the bond tokenization v1 smart contracts
Contribute to v2+ NFT AMM and On-Chain ETF smart contracts
Define and integrate custom on-chain oracles that broadcast event data from internal systems at Souq’s traditional finance partners onto the blockchain for consumption by our smart contracts
Define and integrate custom on-chain DeFi price oracles for consumption by our smart contracts
Own testing procedures and unit test case creation for your areas of ownership. The security of your contracts is your responsibility
Monitor engineers, and collaborate with designers, product managers to turn requirements into products

Must-Haves

BS in CS or similar technical degree
7+ years combined smart contract and backend development experience
Startup Ownership mentality. At Souq, this means unyielding drive to deliver to customers the best possible product functionality
Experience in smart contract development using languages such as Solidity or Cairo
In-depth knowledge and experience with modern languages such as Python, Golang, Java, Scala, or C++
Strong understanding of and passion for financial markets and experience with trading systems or risk engines
Unit, integration and E2E test automation (jest, react-testing-library, MSW, Playwright) as inextricable part of the software development lifecycle
Advanced to native English competency
Bay Area, starting remote but moving to 3 days in office within 12 months

Nice-to-Haves

Experience launching and maintaining web3 projects at scale
Deep knowledge of the cryptocurrency ecosystem (BTC, ETH, etc.) and underlying technologies (blockchain, PoW, PoS, etc.)
Interest and understanding of L1/L2 blockchain technology and ZK-Rollups

Bonus

Experiences with applied mathematics in a financial institution, ideally as a quant for a market maker or hedge fund
Experience with crypto trading systems

Comp

Salary: 140 - 265k
Equity: 50bps shares, 50bps token

Souq jobs

Blockchain Engineer