Senior Protocol Engineer

Prime Intellect is on a mission to accelerate open and decentralized AI progress by enabling anyone to contribute compute, code or capital to train powerful, open models. Our ultimate goal? Openly accessible AGI that benefits everyone. But we can't do it alone and we want to do this together with you.

We are building the infrastructure for decentralized AI development at scale. We aggregate global compute and enable researchers to collaboratively train state-of-the-art models through distributed training across clusters.

Senior Protocol Engineer

We're seeking a pragmatic Senior Protocol Engineer to design and implement the core of our decentralized AI protocol. This role demands deep competence in distributed systems and backend development (currently primarily Rust + Python), with a practical level of familiarity in smart contracts and cryptography.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and build the protocol layers for decentralized compute and intelligence, focusing on scalability, security, and reliability.

• Develop Rust/Python p2p infrastructure and backend components, enabling robust, distributed execution of protocol functionalities.

• Implement and maintain smart contracts when required, ensuring secure integrations while prioritizing overall system design.

• Collaborate with the broader decentralized AI community to drive adoption, interoperability, and innovation.

Requirements

• Experience designing and implementing secure, scalable distributed systems and familiarity with common cryptographic protocols.

• Hands-on Rust/Python development skills, with a track record of deploying production-grade backend applications.

• Working knowledge of smart contracts and dApps on major blockchains (e.g. Ethereum, EVM-compatible chains).

• Strong foundations in computer science and a systems-oriented mindset.

• Familiarity with machine learning, distributed training techniques, or AI infrastructure is a plus.

Benefits & Perks

• Competitive compensation, including equity and token incentives, aligning your success with the growth and impact of Prime Intellect.

• Flexible work arrangements, with the option to work remotely or in-person at our offices in San Francisco.

• Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance for international candidates.

• Quarterly team off-sites, hackathons, conferences and learning opportunities.

• Opportunity to work with a talented, hard-working and mission-driven team, pushing the frontier of decentralized AI protocols

We recently raised $15mm in funding (total of $20mm raised) led by Founders Fund, with participation from Menlo Ventures and prominent angels including Andrej Karpathy (Eureka AI, Tesla, OpenAI), Tri Dao (Chief Scientific Officer of Together AI), Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis), Clem Delangue (Huggingface), Emad Mostaque (Stability AI) and many others.

If you're excited about the opportunity to build the foundation for the future of decentralized AI and create a platform that empowers developers and researchers to push the boundaries of what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.