Founding Rust Engineer (EVM/Substrate)

About Nickel5, Inc.
Nickel5 was founded in the spring of 2023 by a team with decades of experience in technology, finance, and startup execution. Born from a shared conviction that the conventional playbook no longer fits the frontier, we set out to reimagine how bold ideas are funded, built, and scaled.

Our approach blends deep technical expertise with strategic capital and brand engineering — designed to accelerate the next wave of innovation in AI, decentralized infrastructure, and financial systems. We're here to challenge assumptions and build what's next.

Location & Workstyle

• Hybrid: 2–3 days/week onsite in our Boulder, Colorado office; flexible remote the rest
• Employment: Full-time, W-2

Compensation & Benefits (CO Pay Transparency)

• Base salary: $130,000 – $230,000 DOE
• Equity: To be discussed as part of the offer package
• Benefits: Health, vision, and dental; PTO; standard holidays; work computer provided

What you’ll build

• Low-latency, Rust services that power real-time order flow, risk controls, settlement, and data pipelines
• EVM smart contracts (Solidity) for core market logic, custodial flows, emissions, and fee routing
• Substrate runtime modules/pallets for custom chain logic, state transitions, and on-chain risk primitives
• Indexers, matchers, and event streams (WSS/gRPC) for market data and analytics
• Secure wallet/key flows, contract upgrade paths, and internal tooling for rapid iteration
• Integrations with oracles and on/off-chain data vendors; monitoring, alerting, and SLOs

Day-to-day responsibilities

• Own greenfield architecture decisions for protocol + backend components
• Design and implement Substrate pallets and EVM contracts; write property-based tests and fuzzers
• Optimize for latency, throughput, and gas; profile with flamegraphs and benchmarking suites
• Establish code quality, security review, and release processes from the ground up
• Collaborate with product, design, and compliance to translate market rules into safe, auditable code
• Mentor future hires; help build the engineering culture and recruiting rubric

You’ll excel if you have

• Experience building production systems in Rust
• Hands-on EVM experience (Solidity, Foundry/Hardhat, gas optimization, audits, incident response)
• Substrate runtime development (FRAME, pallets, weights, storage/trie, benchmarking)
• Strong systems background (concurrency, memory models, networking, serialization)
• Event-driven architecture: Kafka/NATS/PubSub, idempotent consumers, exactly-once/at-least-once tradeoffs
• Testing rigor: fuzzing (honggfuzz/proptest), property-based testing, invariant frameworks
• Security mindset: threat modeling, key management, reentrancy/MEV/sandwich defenses, upgrade safety
• Clear, concise communication and product sense; bias to ship

Nice-to-haves

• On-chain market design, order books, AMMs, or risk engines
• Oracle design/operations; time-weighted data handling
• WASM internals, no-std, SIMD, or GPU offload experience
• Data infra for real-time analytics (Arrow/Parquet, OLAP, materialized views)
• Familiarity with regulated or age-gated products, and working with legal/compliance partners

How to apply
Send your resume and a brief letter of interest (links to GitHub, audits, crates, or papers welcome) to [email protected].

Equal Opportunity
We’re an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.