Opening: Formal Verification Engineer

Common Prefix is seeking a full-time Formal Verification Engineer.

Applying

Please submit your application here.

We are not accepting outreach from recruiters or staffing agencies. Direct applications only.

Location

Remote worldwide or on-site in Athens, Greece

About us

Common Prefix is a blockchain research & development company. Blockchain technologies enable large-scale economic coordination through shared, programmable ledgers. Our mission is to solve the foundational scientific and engineering challenges standing in the way of mainstream adoption, particularly around interoperability, scalability, and usability.

We combine formal scientific research with production-grade engineering. Our team publishes in top-tier peer-reviewed venues and builds open-source infrastructure used across major blockchain ecosystems. We have contributed to advanced systems including Axelar, XRPL, Sui, and Flashbots, and are trusted partners to protocols building critical infrastructure.

You can learn more about our company on our website.

Description

This is a full-time position for a Formal Verification Engineer with hands-on experience in functional and formal verification, ideally with blockchain software experience.

You will work on formally verifying complex financial blockchain systems and protocols. You will reason about blockchain protocols and implementations using mathematical specifications, invariants, and machine-checked proofs, and connect these analyses to production code and protocol behavior. Your work will directly contribute to the correctness and security of systems that secure and move billions.

In this role you will collaborate with researchers and engineers to specify system behavior, verify critical components, and identify subtle design or implementation flaws. Depending on the project, your work may involve protocol logic, state machines, distributed components, or cryptographic and economic mechanisms.

The role combines independent technical work and direct interaction with partners to explain assumptions, limitations, and results.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will work across the following areas:

Formal verification of blockchain systems

Develop formal specifications of blockchain protocols, smart contracts, and system components

Define invariants, safety properties, and liveness conditions for complex distributed systems

Use formal verification tools like Lean4 to verify correctness properties

Bridge the gap between formal models and real-world implementations

Protocol and system analysis

Reason about protocol behavior under adversarial conditions and edge-case scenarios

Analyze cryptographic assumptions and their implications for protocol correctness

Evaluate design trade-offs and suggest improvements based on formal findings

Tooling and methodology

Contribute to the development and improvement of internal formal verification tools and workflows

Help define best practices for specifying and verifying blockchain systems

Stay up to date with advances in formal methods, verification tooling, and programming languages

Collaboration and communication

Work closely with researchers and engineers to refine specifications and validate assumptions

Communicate findings clearly through written reports and technical discussions

Explain formal verification results, limitations, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders over calls and written correspondence

Requirements

The requirements for this position are:

5+ years of professional formal verification experience

Experience with formal verification tools (e.g., Coq, Lean4, F*, TLA+, or similar)

Experience verifying or modeling non-trivial systems (e.g., distributed systems, compilers, smart contracts, or similar protocols)

Familiarity with one or more programming languages relevant to blockchain and high-performance systems (e.g., C++, Rust, Solidity, Go)

Professional proficiency in spoken and written English

The following skills are appreciated but not required:

Formal education in Computer Science or related STEM fields or equivalent professional experience

Understanding of blockchain fundamentals

Experience formally verifying blockchain protocols or smart contracts

Experience formally verifying distributed systems or cryptographic protocols

Contributions to open-source formal verification tools or research projects

What we offer

Base compensation ranges from $76,000 to $171,000 per year before tax, depending on experience and scope of responsibility, and is not adjusted by location

Equity grants and performance-based bonuses in addition to base compensation

Unlimited vacations (typically ~30 days per year including public holidays), with appropriate planning

Fully remote work, or the option to work from our offices in Athens, Greece

Optional work travel to conferences and partner locations 2-3 times per year

Direct involvement in high-impact formal verification of real-world blockchain systems

Collaboration with experienced researchers and engineers in cryptography and distributed systems

Significant open-source and research-facing work

A small, senior team that values rigor, clarity, best practices, and responsible work

A collaborative, low-ego culture with a strong emphasis on correctness and trust