Staff Protocol Engineer

ABOUT POLYGON LABS

Polygon Labs is a global blockchain payments company building and operating infrastructure to move money instantly, reliably, and at internet scale, with the mission to move all money onchain. It is building the Polygon Open Money Stack, an open and integrated stack of services and technologies to instantly and reliably move money anywhere, and put it to work. Its infrastructure has facilitated trillions of dollars in onchain value transfer and supported millions of transactions daily for some of the globe's largest banks, fintechs, enterprises, and consumer applications.

YOUR ROLE

As a Staff Engineer on the Polygon Labs Chain Engineering team, you will lead the evolution of one of the most widely used blockchain networks toward a high-performance, payments-optimized future. Reporting to the SVP of Engineering, you will define and deliver critical upgrades across throughput, latency, and execution architecture, pushing the boundaries of what Ethereum-aligned infrastructure can achieve.

This role sits at the intersection of protocol design and real-world scalability. You will work on initiatives such as proposer-builder separation and MEV mitigation, parallelized transaction execution in the EVM, and achieving sub-second (targeting ~200ms) pre-confirmation and near-instant finality. You will also help shape the long-term roadmap around gigagas-scale throughput, specialized payment lanes for stablecoin transfers, and forward-looking efforts such as quantum-resilient infrastructure.

Polygon Labs is an AI-native engineering organisation. Engineers here use AI tooling as a core part of how they design, build, and ship - not as an afterthought. You will join a lean, high-caliber team and play a key role in setting technical direction, mentoring engineers, and delivering upgrades that directly impact millions of users and applications.

YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES

- Lead the design and implementation of next-generation scalability improvements across Polygon Chain, including gas throughput optimization and the path toward gigagas-scale execution.

- Drive architectural initiatives such as proposer-builder separation (PBS) and MEV mitigation strategies to improve network efficiency and fairness.

- Design and implement parallelized transaction processing within the EVM to unlock higher throughput and reduce execution bottlenecks.

- Advance low-latency user experience through pre-confirmation mechanisms and fast finality (targeting sub-second confirmation times).

- Explore and prototype specialized execution paths, including dedicated payment lanes for stablecoin transactions that are resilient to network congestion.

- Contribute to long-term protocol evolution, including research and early-stage implementation of quantum-resilient approaches in collaboration with research teams.

- Own and improve core components of the Chain stack, including contributions to Geth and related infrastructure.

- Apply AI-assisted develo