Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem.

As a C++ Engineer at Stellar, you'll be at the heart of it all—designing and evolving Stellar Core, the distributed engine powering our global ledger and consensus. This is your chance to work on real-world, high-impact distributed systems that are actively used by developers, institutions, and builders around the world.

You’ll tackle complex, meaningful challenges that push the boundaries of what’s possible in blockchain—boosting performance, strengthening decentralization, and designing incentive mechanisms that drive long-term network health. Whether you're optimizing peer-to-peer networking, building resilience against coordinated attacks, or simulating consensus models to validate security and scalability—you’ll be doing it all.

If you're excited by formal verification, simulations, distributed systems, and multi-core performance, and want to help shape the foundation of an open financial future, we’d love to meet you.

In this role, you will

Design and build key components of Stellar Core - the backbone software behind the Stellar Network.

Design and develop robust, scalable, and extensible technologies that empower our developers and network participants.

Collaborate on new architectures and subsystems, working alongside our CTO, our team of engineers, and our community of open source developers.

Write clean, maintainable code with an emphasis on edge case analysis and future-proofing our work.

Own core subsystems of Stellar Core, and help the team hit critical product milestones.

Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for all of engineering at SDF.

Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks in order to continue scaling the system.

Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications - we take design seriously, and we encourage everyone to be a part of our RFC processes.

You have

You have 4+ years of experience developing software on a team.

You have a BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent field.

You excel in writing code in modern C++ or Rust in a production environment.

You're a great communicator that can advocate and lead technical discussions, especially during the design and code review process.

You have a solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build components that are reusable, extensible, and modular.

You are knowledgeable of best practices and development tools and are passionate about technological innovation.

You have a passion for performance debugging and benchmarking.

You love a good challenge in an ever-evolving space - many of the challenges we face are being faced for the first time!

You're enthusiastic about working on a small, growing team where you'll be given a lot of autonomy.

You're open, empathetic, and care about putting the best ideas forward in a collaborative and helpful manner.

Bonus Points if

You have direct experience with designing and implementing distributed systems.

You have a strong curiosity in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and understand the fundamentals of these systems.

We offer competitive pay with a base salary range for this position of $180,000 - $280,000 depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, we offer lumen-denominated grants along with the following perks and benefits:

USA Benefits/Perks

Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents

Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break

401(k) with 4% match