Firstly, we’d like to once again thank our community for their continued interest in, and support of our work, as well as the many developers, node operators, and data providers, who have all actively devoted their time and effort to helping enable the next generation of smart contracts. The larger the Chainlink community grows, the more convinced we become that a highly reliable oracle mechanism is indeed what smart contracts have been waiting for in order to reach their full potential.

As leading smart contract networks and individual teams adopt Chainlink (Web3/Polkadot, Hedera, Market Protocol, and many others), and as we begin to collaborate with additional leading technology companies (Google, Oracle, and many others) to realize the next generation of “externally connected smart contracts”, we see a large benefit to increasing the number of great people working on Chainlink.

Below we’ll give a brief overview of why someone should consider a career focused on smart contracts, as well as our current plans for growing the Chainlink team.

Some of the many reasons to build a career around smart contracts:

• Smart contracts are on track to become the dominant form of digital agreement that will power the global economy’s financial markets, insurance industries, global trade (trade finance), and many other agreements that heavily rely on the reliability of a contract. They are fundamentally superior to existing forms of digital agreement, because they can provide unique guarantees that a contract will be executed as written. For example, which contract would you yourself prefer; one that was technologically enforced to an extreme level of certainty, where you always get what you’re owed if you perform, or a paper contract that has multiple escape routes for others, where you may not get what you’re owed.
• Smart contracts provide a unique opportunity to fix some of the current flaws in the agreements that allow costly contractual breaches and various types of society damaging 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, title insurance fraud costs everyone ever buying or selling a home a certain percentage of their real estate transaction because title ownership is updated insecurely and far too slowly using existing systems. The process to update title ownership can take up to one month, opening up a large window of time in which the same real estate can be fraudulently bought/sold multiple times. This and many other forms of malicious contractual breaches, create a large hidden cost which everyone in our society bears.
• Smart contracts provide a unique opportunity to make global financial markets work in a safer, more transparent, and less extreme manner, allowing societies to avoid large financial crises like the one in 2008. For example, if mortgages issued from 2004 to 2008 were built as smart contracts that continually tracked the evolving ownership, credit score, income, and other key factors about a mortgage holder, the financial market participants’ purchasing those mortgages would have had the necessary data to avoid faulty assumptions about solvency, which would have allowed the global economy to greatly soften, and possibly even entirely avoid the financial crisis. Enabling global financial markets to work in the fair, ungameable, and impartial ways they’re supposed to, is indeed something that could significantly change how the world works to everyone’s shared benefit.
• Smart contracts provide an alternative legal system for emerging markets where certain types of agreements can’t currently be formed. Much of the world lacks access to critical contracts which we take for granted e.g. crop insurance, largely because the local legal system cannot effectively enable a level of trust in a contracts reliability. By creating a parallel “technologically enforced legal system”, our work is helping bring entire geographies into a new age of economic prosperity, since the ability to form contracts underpins most, if not all economic activity. For example, crop insurance enforced by a smart contract reliant on weather data and paying out directly to a farmers’ phone is now possible, regardless of his country’s current legal system, or its’ ability to uphold an agreement about an insured event. Providing a working system of contracts for all of the world’s economies is one of the most exciting innovations made possible by blockchains and smart contracts.

Growing Chainlink’s Team and Contributors

In order to achieve the many great outcomes above and more, we believe that the next generation of smart contracts needs to have secure and reliable connectivity to proof that a contractual event has occurred. You can find more details about our approach to enabling these next-generation smart contracts in our whitepaper, our recent announcements, post from users like Google, and many other posts here.

To reach this goal on a timeline that meets users’ demand for this next generation of 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: making a highly useful and extremely secure product, building an open-source and community-driven shared resource, and operating internally as an “idea meritocracy” where an informed and active dialogue is the way we consider important questions. To grow our team and the larger community, we’re thrilled to launch a large and growing Chainlink Careers page, with multiple open positions that we are now actively seeking to hire for.

Some of the categories and specific roles we’re hiring for:

• Software Engineering is the core of what makes Chainlink 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 contracts space with an experienced technical team building a much needed product. We practice agile development and have a well defined distributed/remote work culture that respects people’s time while focusing on results.
• Product Management is an expanding need at Chainlink as we continue to see increased user adoption in multiple categories. Product management at Chainlink focuses on three key dimensions: creating a highly secure oracle/blockchain middleware, generating a large number of useful integrations with key off-chain systems, and making both the security and variety of integrations easily usable by developers. We are currently hiring a Head of Product Management, to help us handle the large increase in demand for Chainlink.
• Integration Engineers play a critical role in expanding what Chainlink is capable of providing to our 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.
• User Experience and Design is also where Chainlink plans to excel. We are building the best user experience for developers who want to build externally connected smart contracts. We are currently looking for an in-house Head of Design who can take ownership of Chainlink’s brand, UI/UX, and visual identity to create easily usable developer tools and online experiences that make us a clear leader.
• Developer Evangelism and Product Marketing helps 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 evangelists and product marketers will effectively communicate with our user base and the larger community to help them learn about and use Chainlink.
• Legal, Compliance, and Operations play a critical role in enabling Chainlink 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. We are looking for a General Counsel who wants to take a leading role in navigating the many complex and interesting issues found in our space.

In order to help us achieve these goals, we do expect additional influxes of capital into Chainlink, which we plan to use for the continued growth of our team, expansion of resources available to the community, and support of integrations with high profile blockchain platform partners, data providers, and smart contract consumers of off-chain data/events. We do sincerely appreciate our community’s continued support and understanding as we expand the number of people working on Chainlink, and we will of course do our best to ensure that our expansion plans are accomplished responsibly, carefully managing the company’s resources, capital and LINK, with a focus on continuing to create an overall positive effect on the Chainlink network over the long-term.

If you want to join us in creating the next generation of smart contracts, you’re welcome to look over our growing list of open positions here.