PRIVATE · ARBITRUM · Offchain Labs

Senior Backend Engineer, ZeroDev Wallet

Go services for ZeroDev's non-custodial wallets: distributed keys, TEEs, passkeys. You would work for Offchain Labs, which bought ZeroDev on 13 August 2025. Price of that deal was not disclosed. Pay on this posting is not disclosed.

You are deciding whether to work on Nitro, a req created in April 2025, or on ZeroDev keys inside a company that bought ZeroDev in August 2025 for an undisclosed price.

Blockchain Lab analysis, for a candidate deciding whether to apply. We are not the employer. Compensation on this posting: Not disclosed.

Since created

91 days — confirm the req

Equity

Private. Illiquid.

Employer-stated capital

$124 million

Where

Remote

Status: Open on the employer board — checked 2026-10-06
Posting created: 2026-07-07 · 91 days before this check
Location: Remote
Remote eligibility: Remote. The posting does not say worldwide.
Employment: Full-time
Compensation: Not disclosed
Experience, as stored: Production Go, or a neighbouring systems language with a willingness to go deep in Go. Applied cryptography is required at the level of signatures and key management, not a research doctorate.
Board updated: Not disclosed. Lever’s public record gave a created date, not a later edit.

Apply on the employer site The company

Policy-controlled walletEnforce the limit and the stopper

Decision board

Blockchain Lab analysis

Apply if

You have operated production Go, or you will say how fast you can get there.
You can reason about keys, signatures, and blast radius without claiming to be a cryptographer. They wrote that distinction.
You want wallet infrastructure, not the Nitro client.

Do not apply if

You wanted Nitro.
You want a custodian's job. The posting says non-custodial, on purpose.
You need a band.

You would own

Wallet creation, auth, signing, recovery, and the review trail around that code.

You would not own

It does not own Nitro, the acquisition price, or a printed salary.

What they wrote, and what we read

Employer stated

Distributed key generation and secret sharing so no single party holds a user's key.

Reading

The product promise is the threat model. If a committee can collude, the adjective non-custodial is marketing.

Employer stated

Trusted execution environments: key material under hardware isolation and remote attestation.

Reading

TEEs fail in specific, boring ways. Ask which hardware, and who they believe.

Employer stated

Passkeys, WebAuthn, OAuth, OTP, sessions, and a third-party signer.

Reading

The user-facing auth is in scope. This is not only a KMS in a corner.

ZeroDev's own note says it was founded in 2022, shipped account-abstraction tooling, and chose Offchain because of the stack around Arbitrum, not because a wallet should become Arbitrum-only. The acquisition announcement says financial terms were not disclosed. You are not joining a startup with its own cap table anymore. Ask what happened to ZeroDev equity, and whether your grant is Offchain Labs paper.

The employer says it is backed by $124 million. Same sentence as the Nitro posting. Same caveat. Created on Lever 7 July 2026, so this req is younger than Nitro's and younger than the acquisition. That is a better freshness signal. It is not a compensation signal.

Ninety days — illustrative

Not the employer’s onboarding plan.

Days 1–30: draw the key ceremony as it is, including who is in the committee.
Days 31–60: one auth path with a threat model signed by a reviewer.
Days 61–90: an auditor's comment you turned into a code change.

A week you can rehearse

Explain recovery without a single party holding the key.
Say what a TEE does not protect.
Ask who employs you: Offchain, a ZeroDev subsidiary, or a name you have not heard.

Ask them

What happened to pre-acquisition equity, and what would I receive?
What is the cash range?
Which TEE, and has it been reviewed?

Walk away if

Non-custodial is a slogan and one service holds the key.
They cannot name the employer of record after the acquisition.
The seat is a Solidity audit rotation.

Proof you can build before you apply

The wallet-policy lab: an approval limit and a person who can stop a payment. Illustrative. Not their KMS.

Policy-controlled walletEnforce the limit and the stopper

The company you would actually join

Blockchain Lab analysis

Public reporting and the employer’s own releases. Not a relationship with Blockchain Lab. Not a credit opinion.

Founded: 2018. Steven Goldfeder is the chief executive. Harry Kalodner and Ed Felten are the co-founders the company's technical history is told through.
Base: Both seats say Remote. Neither says worldwide.
Status: Private. The posting says backed by $124 million. That is the employer's sum, not a fresh round.
People: The ZeroDev acquisition closed into this company on 13 August 2025. Price not disclosed.

Offchain is the company. Arbitrum One is the chain most people mean. The DAO is a third thing, with its own token. The posting leans on the ecosystem — Robinhood, BlackRock, Ethena, Securitize, Aave, Apechain are names the employer lists as using the stack. Those are distribution claims. They are not your customer list on day one, and they are not revenue.

The two seats age differently. Nitro's Lever record was created on 17 April 2025 and was still up on 6 October 2026. Seventeen months is long enough that the team you imagine may have shipped the work or lost the headcount. ZeroDev's record was created on 7 July 2026, after the August 2025 acquisition had had a year to settle. The work there is key custody without becoming a custodian: committees, secret sharing, TEEs, passkeys. If you cannot draw who can reconstruct a key, you are not the hire, however strong your Go is.

Founders

Steven Goldfeder

Co-founder and CEO

The operating executive of the company that ships Arbitrum the software, which is not the same organisation as the Arbitrum DAO that holds the ARB token. Confusing those two is how candidates mis-price an offer.

Ed Felten and Harry Kalodner

Co-founders

Felten is the Princeton systems figure; Kalodner the long-time builder beside Goldfeder. The Nitro seat is their stack. The ZeroDev seat is a product they bought. Different grandparents, same payroll.

What the company sells

Arbitrum

The posting's claim: Arbitrum One is the most widely adopted Ethereum scaling stack, and over 100 teams have used the technology to build their own chains. Employer-stated.

Nitro

The core you would join on the older req: distributed systems, performance, security of that stack. Go, C++, or Rust, plus WebAssembly and compilers as familiarity.

ZeroDev

Smart accounts. The wallet seat builds Go services for non-custodial signing: distributed keys, TEEs, passkeys. Acquired, not founded here.

Capital

Employer-stated capital

$124 million

On the posting. Not itemised by round here.

ZeroDev price

Not disclosed

13 August 2025 release.

These seats' pay

Not disclosed

Neither posting states a band.

ARB

Not your equity

DAO token. A grant of ARB would be a token grant. Ask if one exists. Do not assume it.

On the posting
Employer's own sum
$124 million
The Lever text says the company is backed by $124 million. This brief does not add a newer priced round on top of that sentence. Historical Series A and Series B figures circulate in databases. They are not repeated here as if this desk re-read the closes.
13 Aug 2025
Acquisition of ZeroDev
Not disclosed
Offchain's release: strategic acquisition of ZeroDev, terms not disclosed. ZeroDev's own note says the product keeps supporting many chains, not only Arbitrum. The wallet seat exists because of this deal.

What should change your mind

Stale Nitro req. Created April 2025. Confirm it is alive.
Undisclosed acquisition price. ZeroDev equity, if you had any, is already a story. New hires do not inherit it.
Remote without a country list.
Token confusion. ARB is not Offchain stock.

Ask them

Is the Nitro seat a 2025 req that nobody closed, and who would you report to?
What of ZeroDev is still the roadmap versus what was acqui-hired?
Which countries can the remote contract actually employ?
Is any compensation denominated in ARB?

Sources

If a figure is not in those sources, it is not in this brief on purpose.

What the employer actually wrote

Employer stated. Senior backend engineer on the ZeroDev wallet stack inside Offchain Labs: Go services for non-custodial signing, distributed key generation, TEEs, and passkeys.

Backend services: build and operate Go services that power wallet creation, authentication, and signing at scale
Key recovery and the committee trust model: distributed key generation and secret sharing that keep the service non-custodial, with recovery authority split across independent committees so no single party holds a user's key
Trusted Execution Environments: reconstructing and operating on key material under hardware isolation and remote attestation
Authentication and signing-provider integration: the user-facing auth methods that gate signing (passkeys / WebAuthn, OAuth, OTP, sessions, 2FA), and integrating with a third-party signing provider (authorization and policy flows, scoped credentials, quorum / consensus approvals)
Security review and hardening: writing design docs and decision records, working directly with external security auditors, and turning a high review bar into shipped code

Source: the employer’s public Lever record, job ea44f500-981b-4d7e-9203-3ada1dc12365. Open the original. First seen by this desk 2026-10-06. Nothing above the fold is a substitute for that page.

A reading of the work

Blockchain Lab analysis. These lines are a reading of the advertisement. They are not extra hiring requirements.

Draw who can reconstruct a key. If the answer is one party, you missed the posting.
ZeroDev was acquired. Ask what is still the product and what was a talent deal.
A TEE is not a custody model. Remote attestation is.

Still not disclosed

Anything the compensation line does not already quote. A printed band is the employer’s sentence for the place they named — not a Blockchain Lab estimate, and not a promise for every location on the posting.
A later edit date. Lever exposed when the posting was created, not when it was last refreshed.
Which countries may apply. “Remote” alone is not worldwide eligibility. If the employer wrote a country or a region, that sentence is theirs — still ask which entity can hire you.
Visa sponsorship, the real on-call rota, and the employing subsidiary, unless the posting already named them.

Not a recommendation to apply. Not an employer assessment. Figures from public reporting move, and a database is not a filing. How this desk labels evidence. Report a listing.

Offchain Labs · Remote · pay not disclosed

Apply