The Chainlink Network has rapidly accelerated in adoption over the past year, now securing over $7B for live and in-progress integrations. We would like to extend our gratitude to the community for their passionate support, as well as to the many developers, node operators, data providers, academics, and more who have devoted their time and effort to helping our ecosystem gain momentum and enabling the next generation of smart contracts. As Chainlink powers new and innovative use cases for data-driven smart contracts, it has become more clear than ever that highly secure and reliable oracles are what smart contracts need to reach their full potential.

Join a Growing Team of Industry Experts

As the Chainlink Network continues to grow rapidly, we see a large benefit to increasing the number of talented people working on the Chainlink Network. The Chainlink Labs team has already grown 3x over the past year to over 100+ people and this growth will continue in the coming year. Chainlink Labs team members come from a broad and diverse background including graduates and professors from Harvard Business School, Columbia University, and numerous prestigious institutions from around the globe. Team members include industry experts such as Ari Juels, who previously led research at RSA as Chief Scientist and is now a faculty member at Cornell Tech.

Joining the Chainlink Labs team means you will be working directly alongside an A-team of industry experts and will have a high degree of real responsibility in cultivating the growth of Chainlink. As an idea meritocracy, Chainlink Labs is a collaborative environment designed to bring the best ideas to production. 2020 was a period of major growth for the Chainlink team and we see this continuing into 2021, so we are actively expanding the team to meet the growing demand for highly secure and reliable blockchain oracles.

Help Build the Most Widely Used Oracle Protocol

The Chainlink ecosystem continues to rapidly expand and include more leading blockchain networks (Ethereum, Polkadot, Avalanche, BSN), DeFi projects (Aave, Synthetix, WBTC, Curve), data providers (Deutsche Telekom MMS, Huobi, Finage, TraderMade), and numerous collaborations with leading technology companies (Google, Oracle, and more). Working on the most widely used oracle solution in the blockchain space, Chainlink Labs is continuing to expand its development team in order to scale up and support the onboarding of more ecosystem integrations and participants.

To make the case for why someone should consider a career focused on smart contracts, here are a few fundamental reasons why we believe smart contracts will change the world for the better, as well as our plans for growing the Chainlink team with exceptional individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, and from all corners of the globe.

Smart Contracts Are a Superior Form of Digital Agreements

Smart contracts are poised to become the de facto form of digital agreement. They will undergird global financial markets, the insurance industry, global trade, and countless other industries that heavily depend on the reliability of a contract to manage transactions across a network of different participants. Smart contracts are superior to the traditional agreements of today because instead of being settled by a centralized entity, which creates major counterparty risks, settlement occurs on a decentralized blockchain network that guarantees contracts execute as written. This built-in trust factor eliminates counterparty risks and enables the creation of a more fluid global economy where participants are ensured their contracts are fulfilled as expected.

Smart Contract Composability Enables Innovative New Use Cases

Smart contracts are highly programmable digital agreements. Because they operate on decentralized blockchain networks, smart contracts provide additional benefits not available to the centralized agreements of today. Not only do smart contracts have the ability to become dynamic and reactive to data inputs in real-time, but they are natively composable with other smart contracts operating on the same blockchain network. This composability has exponentially increased the number of potential smart contract use cases and dramatically lowered development times as engineers combine existing contracts, in a permissionless manner, to build new and advanced agreements that previously were technically infeasible. This has already been seen in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem where deposits into one protocol are tokenized and can be seamlessly deposited in another protocol, increasing capital efficiency.

Smart Contracts Reduce Fraud and Transactional Friction

Smart contracts are fixing the flaws in current agreements that allow for costly contractual breaches and various types of fraud. Fundamentally, fraud depends on the manipulation of weak and poorly secured systems, which is where smart contracts excel at protecting themselves and their users. For example, a weather insurance contract may require a human adjuster to come out to a property to determine the damages and how much funds are to be paid out to the insuree. However, this process is entirely determined by human actors who have an incentive to pay out as little as possible. Instead, a parametric insurance smart contract can be created that is settled based on deterministic data inputs, removing the human adjuster from the equation and reducing chances of fraud occurring.

Smart Contracts Provide Permissionless Access to Financial Services

Smart contracts, and the blockchain networks they operate upon, provide an alternative legal system for emerging markets where certain types of agreements can’t currently be formed due to a lack of local legal infrastructure. A large portion of the world does not have access to traditional financial services that we use on a daily basis, such as lending and borrowing services, largely because the local legal system cannot provide a high enough level of trust that a contract will execute as written. By creating a parallel “technologically-enforced legal system”, smart contracts are able to provide unprecedented financial access and opportunity, since the ability to form contracts underpins most, if not all, economic activity. Such legal contracts can range from home insurance to hedging against the rising prices of raw materials. Providing a sufficiently secure system of contracts for all of the world’s economies is an exciting use case of smart contract technology and one we hope to bring to the world at large.

Chainlink Career Opportunities and Open Positions

For smart contracts to cross the chasm into mainstream adoption, they first require a highly reliable and secure source of external data to prove that a real-world contractual event has occurred. More details about our approach to enabling these next-generation, oracle-enabled smart contracts can be found in our whitepaper, developer documentation, and our posts on the Chainlink blog.

To meet the growing demand across the globe for universally connected smart contracts, we plan to increase the number of great people working on and contributing to Chainlink. The collaborative environment at Chainlink is focused on three key principles:

• Building world-changing tech by solving complex problems along with some of the industry’s brightest coworkers
• Accelerated ownership and career growth as we go through hyper-growth and accelerate in user adoption
• Being an early part of our success story, getting in on the ground floor and building something important with us

To grow our team and the larger Chainlink community, we’re thrilled to announce a multitude of open positions on the Chainlink Labs Careers page, where you can see the specific functions that we are now actively seeking to hire for. Open roles include but are not limited to the following:

• Product Management is an expanding need as we continue to see increased user adoption of different Chainlink technologies. Chainlink Labs is looking for a blockchain integration product manager to lead the integration of Chainlink into numerous blockchain and DLT networks, a data products product manager to lead the growth of Chainlink’s data products and scope out potential features based on user requests, a DeFi product manager to expand Chainlink’s core user base in the decentralized finance ecosystem, and a gaming product manager to lead the adoption of Chainlink’s Verifiable Randomness Function within the on-chain gaming ecosystem.
• Engineering and Development is the core of what makes Chainlink Labs a leader in critical blockchain infrastructure. We are excited about working with great senior software engineers that have a genuine interest in building world-changing infrastructure. Experience with making developer tools, large distributed systems, securing high-value data, and working on open source projects are all a big plus. We are happy to work with great engineers without any blockchain experience, because we do have the internal capability of getting them up to speed on blockchains/smart contracts correctly and relatively quickly. This is a good opportunity to get into the blockchain/smart contract space with an experienced technical team building a much-needed product. We practice agile development and have a well-defined, distributed work culture that respects people’s time while focusing on results.
• Integration Specialists play a critical role in expanding what Chainlink is capable of providing to end-users. Integration engineers own specific integrations with key blockchain platforms and critical data providers, while also supporting various leading smart contract development teams in their use of Chainlink. Whether you’re an experienced blockchain engineer who wants to work with a variety of blockchains/smart contract networks or you’re just getting into blockchains/smart contracts and are eager to learn more, this is a great role to get started with working on Chainlink.
• Academic Research is a key component of our mission of building highly secure and cutting-edge decentralized oracle technologies such as Town Crier, Mixicles, and DECO. Led by Ari Juels, researchers will work directly with top domain experts to identify and solve key research challenges and build production solutions that keep Chainlink at the forefront of oracle system deployment and fuel the success of the smart contract ecosystem. Research work can be done full-time as a Chainlink Labs team member or through a Chainlink research grant.
• Legal, Operations, and People play a critical role in enabling Chainlink Labs to navigate the many compliance and various other legal questions that a large-scale open-source project has to address on its path to industry-standard adoption. Chainlink Labs is looking for a Senior Legal Counsel who wants to take a leading role in navigating the many complex and interesting issues found in our space. The Chief Operating Officer role would oversee the development of a hyper-growth global blockchain company and scale global operations. A People Operations Manager role is also available and would be responsible for collaborating across departments and teams to develop and lead global People initiatives.
• Business Development works directly with leading smart contract projects, global enterprises, data providers, and government offices looking to adopt and integrate Chainlink’s technology. Chainlink Labs is looking for a Director of Business Development to contribute to the creation of sales processes and tooling for scaling up the amount of leading smart contract teams that use Chainlink, as well as executing sales strategies for getting leading enterprises to use Chainlink in their existing architecture.
• Marketing and Developer Advocacy help our users fully understand what Chainlink’s next-generation smart contracts offer them. As more developers learn about smart contracts and want to build useful externally aware contracts, we find ourselves with an increasing user base to interact with. Chainlink developer advocates and product marketers will effectively communicate with our user base and the larger community to help them learn about and use Chainlink. A Head of Communications is also available in order to create a compelling brand message as well as develop and execute a world-class media strategy that shares the Chainlink story across the international business, trade (blockchain/tech), and mainstream press.

We expect 2021 to be another year of record growth for the Chainlink ecosystem and our team. We’ll continue to deploy substantial capital across the ecosystem to support more great team members, blockchain integrations, additional tooling, services, data providers, node operators, individual developers, and dApp teams using Chainlink to consume off-chain data and events in their smart contracts. We are incredibly grateful for this community’s continued enthusiasm, support, and understanding of what it takes to build world-class decentralized infrastructure. We look forward to working together with all of the people building Chainlink, as we enter the next chapter of the Chainlink Network’s development.

If you want to join us in creating the next generation of smart contracts, explore our growing list of open roles, or drop your resume here if you don’t yet see an open role that matches your experience. We’re excited to hear from you!