PRIVATE · AI EXECUTION · Ritual

Developer Experience Engineer

The person who has to make Ritual feel like Foundry. High leverage, and the first role blamed when nobody builds.

You are deciding whether to join a small research company whose last clearly announced round is years behind the postings, on a product that is still easier to describe than to run in production.

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

Listing age

641 days — confirm the req

Equity

Private. Illiquid.

Priced capital we will stand behind

$25m in Nov 2023

Where

Remote

Status: Open on the employer board — checked 2026-10-06
Board updated: 2025-01-03 · 641 days before this check
Location: Remote
Remote eligibility: Remote
Employment: Not disclosed
Compensation: Not disclosed
Experience, as stored: Developer-tooling experience. A numeric bar was not stated in the stored fields.
Original post date: Not disclosed

Apply on the employer site The company Practice project

This seat

Blockchain Lab analysis

Frameworks, local devnets, CLIs, SDKs, and the tutorial that fails in plain language.

It does not own the client, the model, or the audit. DX that quietly rewrites the protocol is how early companies stall.

The posting is unusually specific: do for AI-enabled chains what Foundry did for the EVM, and make a local loop as fast as Anvil. That is a tools engineer with taste, not a developer-relations calendar.

The trap is building a beautiful SDK against a moving precompile. Your first month should be spent deleting steps, not adding surfaces.

Board date 3 January 2025. If the tools already shipped, ask why the req is still open. If they did not, ask who used the last release.

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: 2023
Base: Distributed. No single headquarters is stated on the roles we store.
Status: Private. No token price, circulating supply, or revenue is treated as a fact in this brief.
People: A January 2025 secondary profile put the team near 30. That number is not current headcount.

The technical bet is specific. A blockchain does not run a large model inside the EVM. Ritual's public design inserts a coprocessor: specialised nodes execute a model, then return an output a contract can accept. Infernet is the oracle-shaped version of that idea. The chain, if and when it is the production system, is where stateful precompiles, parallel execution, and heterogeneous workloads are supposed to live. That is why the open roles are not 'AI engineer' in the application sense. They are client, networking, contract-library, and validator roles.

The corporate fact pattern is thinner than the technical writing. One priced round is public. A second is a database row. Several of the Greenhouse records this desk stores were last updated in 2024 or early 2025 and were still listed on 6 October 2026. A listing that has not moved in over a year can be a real job, a forgotten req, or a role whose team no longer matches the text. Confirm the hiring manager is alive to the req before you prepare.

There is also a founder-specific item a candidate should not learn about in week three. In July 2024, reporting said Polychain was investigating Niraj Pant over an alleged financial relationship with portfolio company Eclipse during his time at the firm. This brief found the allegation in secondary coverage and did not find a public finding, settlement, or exoneration. Ask. It is not a verdict, and it is not optional colour.

Founders

Niraj Pant

Co-founder

Previously an investor at Polychain. Contemporaneous coverage credits him with early involvement around projects including EigenLayer and Solana. He is the public face of the round Archetype led.

Akilesh Potti

Co-founder

Described in the November 2023 funding coverage as a quant and builder who had worked at Palantir. The pairing is investor-plus-operator, not two protocol engineers from the same client team.

What the company sells

Infernet

The first product described in public writing: a way for a contract to request an off-chain model run and a proof, rather than a price feed.

Ritual Chain

The execution layer in the company's own framing: stateful precompiles and heterogeneous compute, including AI workloads, on top of Ethereum-client ideas.

Developer path

Frameworks, local environments, and the accelerator language (Altar, Realm) used to pull application teams toward the chain.

Capital

Priced capital we will stand behind

$25m in Nov 2023

Lead investor's own post.

Later round

Not confirmed

A 2025 Series A appears in Preqin only.

Revenue

Not disclosed

No public accounts.

Last priced valuation

Not disclosed

The $25m round did not publish a post-money figure we will repeat.

8 Nov 2023
Seed, announced by the lead
$25 million
Archetype posted that it was leading Ritual's $25 million round. Blockworks called it a seed. Named participants in that coverage include Accomplice and Robot Ventures. Preqin also lists dao5, Anagram, Hack VC, and Dialectic. Some later blogs mislabel this round a Series A.
March 2025
Series A, database-reported
$25 million, unconfirmed here
Preqin records a further $25 million with Accel, Avra, Hypersphere, and Polychain as new names, plus returning funds. This dossier did not find a Ritual press release for that round. Treat it as a database entry until the company confirms it.

What should change your mind

Runway and round status are not something you can read in a filing. Private company, one confirmed round.
Mainnet, token, and fee switch are not facts this dossier will assert. The job text sometimes says mainnet. That is the employer's word. Ask what is actually in production.
Stale reqs. The smart-contract posting was last updated on the board on 24 July 2024.
The category is crowded and narrative-heavy. A coprocessor that cannot show a paid workload is a research project with a payroll.

Ask them

Which round is the company actually operating on, and is the March 2025 Series A closed?
What is live: Infernet, a testnet, a mainnet, a token? Who pays for inference today?
Why has this specific req not been updated, and who would you report to?
What is the public status of the Polychain / Eclipse matter?
Is the role worldwide remote, or remote inside a list of countries the posting never names?

Sources

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

How the first months would actually go

Illustrative preparation

Not the employer’s onboarding plan.

Days 1–30: a cold-start diary from a stranger, which can be you on day one.
Days 31–60: a local environment that survives a bad inference response without a stack trace from another language.
Days 61–90: one tutorial the protocol team will actually link. If they will not link it, it is not done.

A week you can rehearse

Run the current quickstart yourself, timed, and write down every guess.
Cut one step. Say what the user no longer has to know.
Keep the example on a version you are willing to maintain next quarter.

What to take into the room

Illustrative preparation

Show a CLI you shipped and the issue that made you change the default.
How do you version a tool when the chain has not versioned itself?
What is the failure string a user should see when a model times out?

Proof you can build before you apply

The integration-example lab: one path, runnable, failure printed. That is the job in miniature.

Open Integration example. Document one working integration with a runnable example and a printed failure.

Walk away if

The role is actually conference talks with no commit rights.
There is no local dev story because the client does not build on a laptop, and they do not see that as a problem.
You would be the only tools engineer, with no review.

What the employer actually wrote

Employer stated. The hire builds the path other developers walk: frameworks, local test environments, and the automation around Ritual's chain.

Design and implement best-in-class development frameworks that do for AI-enabled chains what Foundry did for the EVM
Identify friction points in the developer journey and build solutions to address them
Build lightning-fast local development environments that make testing against Ritual as seamless as working with tools like anvil
Create elegant CLIs and SDKs that make complex AI and blockchain interactions feel natural
Craft developer tooling that makes deploying and testing AI-enabled smart contracts a joy

Source: the employer’s public Greenhouse record, job 4614247007. 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.

Ship a path a stranger can run locally, with the failure printed in plain language.
Cut one step from the tutorial and say what the user no longer has to guess.
Keep the example on a version you are willing to maintain.

Still not disclosed

Compensation, unless a figure appears in the header. None of these eighteen postings stated one.
Closing date, and the day the role was first published. The board timestamp is an update.
Which countries may apply. “Remote” alone is not worldwide eligibility. If the employer wrote “worldwide”, that sentence is theirs — still ask which entity can hire you.
Visa sponsorship, on-call, and the employing subsidiary.

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.

Ritual · Remote · pay not disclosed

Apply