Principal Engineer, R&D

About the role

We're creating an R&D function and hiring its first leader. This person will explore new product opportunities across Zodl's consumer and infrastructure surface area, including mobile, desktop, web-based wallets, Zallet, headless/agentic wallets, and commerce tools. The best ideas become working prototypes that get handed off to our engineering and product teams for development and release. This is not a product management role. You won't be writing tickets and running standups. And it's not a pure research role. We need working code, not papers. The job is to independently identify opportunities, evaluate their feasibility against real protocol constraints, build proof-of-concept implementations, and make a case for what we should build next. You'll work closely with the CEO (who serves as Head of Product) to align R&D priorities with product strategy. You'll partner with our Head of Partnerships to evaluate technologies from partners and ecosystem players, conducting reviews for fit and viability. And you'll collaborate with our Head of Protocol R&D to validate that what you're proposing is achievable at the protocol level. But the expectation is that you can operate independently: form a thesis, pick up the right language or framework, build something that works, and present it with a clear recommendation.

Responsibilities

• Identify and evaluate new product opportunities across Zodl's product suite and beyond, including agentic wallets, web-based wallets, commerce infrastructure, cross-chain capabilities, privacy-preserving UX patterns, and areas we haven't thought of yet
• Build working prototypes in whatever stack fits the problem (Rust, TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, Python) to validate feasibility and demonstrate value
• Evaluate partner and ecosystem technologies (cross-chain protocols, hardware wallet integrations, DeFi primitives, payment rails) in collaboration with our Head of Partnerships, conducting fit and viability reviews
• Work with the CEO/Head of Product to align R&D exploration with product strategy and company direction
• Consult with mobile engineering on R&D activities to ensure alignment with platform constraints
• Leverage core and mobile engineering teams to assist and collaborate on prototypes as their bandwidth permits
• Produce clear handoff artifacts (specs, architectural recommendations, and prototype code) that our engineering teams can use to plan and execute development
• Assess protocol-level feasibility independently, understanding when and how to engage our Head of Protocol R&D for deeper validation
• Present findings and recommendations to the CEO and broader team with conviction and clarity

Requirements

• Required
• Significant experience building in the blockchain/crypto space. You understand wallets, key management, transaction construction, and on-chain/off-chain tradeoffs at a level where you can reason about them without hand-holding
• Polyglot builder. You pick up languages and frameworks as needed rather than being anchored to one stack. You've shipped code in at least three languages in a professional context
• Strong product intuition. You can articulate why something should be built, not just how. You've originated product ideas that shipped, not just executed on someone else's vision
• Excellent written communication. This is a remote, async-first team. Your prototypes need documentation. Your recommendations need to be legible to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort operating independently with high ambiguity. You won't have a detailed roadmap handed to you. You'll be expected to define your own priorities and make a case for them
• Preferred
• Experience with privacy-preserving technologies (zero-knowledge proofs, shielded transactions, viewing keys, threshold signatures/FROST)
• Familiarity with the Zcash ecosystem or adjacent privacy-focused protocols
• Experience with cross-chain interoperability (bridges, intents-based architectures, atomic swaps)
• Background in consumer wallet or payments UX
• Experience with web-based wallet architectures (browser extensions, progressive web apps, embedded wallets)
• Experience evaluating and integrating third-party SDKs and partner technologies
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup where you wore multiple hats
• How This Rol

Benefits

Additional Information

Location: Remote Reports to: CEO Compensation: $180K-$250K base + equity About ZODL ZODL (Zcash Open Development Lab) is building the software necessary to onboard billions of users to Zcash. Created by the original inventors and developers of the Zcash protocol, we deliver world-class UX for ZEC on top of our core protocol work. Our product suite includes Zodl mobile (iOS and Android) with built-in cross-chain swaps, and Zallet, a full-node Zcash wallet written in Rust, built as a replacement for the zcashd wallet. On the horizon: Zodl Vault (a desktop wallet for multisig, inheritance, and institutional use cases), web-based wallets, and headless/agentic wallet infrastructure.

Your Match

How well this role fits your profile.

Company Intel

What employees say

Worked at ZODL? Share your experience