Protocol & Consensus Engineer

Who We Are:

At Dria, we’re building a distributed, crowdsourced hyperscaler—a movement led by everyday people that unlocks faster, more affordable inference for everyone.

Dria powers scalable, high-performance inference across diverse CPU and GPU platforms. Our mission is to deliver accessible, cutting-edge performance anytime, anywhere.

We’re developing an inference engine optimized for heterogeneous devices, along with an open-source, crowdsourced AI inference SDK tailored for distributed AI workloads.

Our research is focused on delivering high-quality AI for 8 billion unique lives, with an emphasis on compilers, sharding, peer-to-peer networks, CPU/GPU inference, and data generation.

About the Job:

As a Protocol & Consensus Engineer, you will design and build a network purpose-built for an AI compiler for high-performance GenAI workloads– a network that natively schedules GPU/NPU workloads, rewards high-quality model outputs, and safeguards validator integrity. You will own everything from consensus design to validator security hardening and will publish an open-source client that becomes the reference implementation.

Qualifications & Technical Toolkit:

• 5+ years systems or distributed-systems engineering; 3+ years Rust/C++ in production.
• Shipped or maintained at least one production blockchain, large-scale distributed DB, or consensus engine.
• Deep knowledge of BFT & PoS variants (Tendermint, Casper FFG, Albatross, Lachesis).
• Proven track record securing a validator or critical infrastructure (firewalls, HSMs, remote signers).
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, globally distributed, open-source culture

Day-to-Day Tech Stack:

• Rust
• Wasmtime / custom AI-VM
• libp2p ∙ Cosmos-SDK-style ABCI (or custom)
• Grafana/Prometheus
• Cosign/HSM
• Kubernetes & eBPF-based observability.

Good to Have:

• Published research or OSS contributions on hybrid or resource-weighted consensus.
• GPU/TPU orchestration experience (CUDA, ROCm, Triton, Vulkan-compute).
• Familiarity with verifiable-compute schemes for AI model outputs.
• Exposure to token-economic design for validator incentives & slashing.

What We Offer:

• Competitive Base Salary + meaningful token allocation tied to mainnet milestones.
• Budget for compute and conference travel.
• Remote-first; HQ in NYC and offsites in the US/ Europe.
• Open-source royalties for merged external research papers.
• A job with Purpose and Meaning!