Founding Communication Protocol Engineer

About Palette Labs

Palette Labs is building a decentralized protocol for commerce. Our first major use case is food delivery. We run a profitable, growing network where customers order from restaurants, drivers deliver food, and local operators spin up their own marketplaces. Think Uber Eats, but permissionless and owned by the people who use it.

We’re now focused on unlocking restaurant access at scale and maturing the underlying protocol that powers our network. That means designing verifiable data models, interoperable onchain/offchain infrastructure, economic incentives, and the core primitives that allow anyone to build on top of Palette’s decentralized commerce network.

To learn more about Palette Labs and read our whitepaper take a look at: https://palette-labs-inc.github.io/

About the Role

The Communication Protocol Engineer role is critical to defining and building the decentralized communication layer that underpins the Palette ecosystem.

Rather than focusing purely on smart contracts, this role centers on designing and implementing open, interoperable protocols that allow independent actors — operators, marketplaces, apps, and infrastructure providers — to coordinate in a verifiable and extensible way. Think along the lines of decentralized social protocols (e.g. AT Protocol / Bluesky) or open commerce standards (e.g. UCP-style architectures).

You will work closely with the founders, backend team, and marketplace operators to translate real-world commerce flows into protocol-native communication primitives. Success will be measured by the clarity and adoption of the protocol specification, correctness of its reference implementation, successful integration by external partners, and your ability to drive major protocol milestones in the first 6–12 months.

This is a foundational role: your decisions will shape how independent systems interoperate within Palette for years to come.

Responsibilities

• Design and specify core communication primitives — identity, authentication, message formats, state transitions, and event propagation.

• Develop canonical protocol schemas (events, resources, attestations, capabilities) that external builders can reliably implement.

• Architect federation and interoperability models between independent nodes/operators.

• Design verification mechanisms for trust-minimized coordination (signatures, attestations, replay protection, sequencing).

• Build and maintain a reference implementation (backend services, SDKs, or protocol nodes) to validate the specification.

• Define versioning, upgrade, and backwards-compatibility strategies for long-lived protocol evolution.

• Collaborate with backend and product teams to ensure protocol abstractions cleanly map to real-world commerce flows.

• Evaluate and integrate relevant standards (DIDs, verifiable credentials, content-addressed data, event streams, etc.).

• Contribute to public-facing documentation, specifications, and open-source tooling.

• Lead protocol security thinking, including threat modeling and adversarial analysis at the network and schema layer.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience building distributed systems or web-scale backend infrastructure.

• Experience designing or contributing to communication protocols, APIs, or interoperable standards (not just implementing them).

• Strong understanding of identity, authentication, and cryptographic primitives (public/private key systems, signatures, replay protection).

• Experience building production-grade web services and event-driven systems.

• Deep understanding of REST, RPC, or streaming protocols (e.g., HTTP, WebSockets, gRPC, pub/sub systems).

• Strong systems thinking: state machines, versioning, backwards compatibility, failure modes, and network-level tradeoffs.

• Proven ability to design from first principles in ambiguous problem spaces.

• Strong written communication skills — ability to produce clear protocol specifications and technical documentation.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with decentralized or federated protocols (e.g. AT Protocol/Bluesky-style systems, ActivityPub, Matrix, Nostr, etc.).

• Experience working on open commerce or interoperability standards (e.g. UCP or similar initiatives).

• Familiarity with blockchain systems and onchain/offchain coordination patterns.

• Experience designing SDKs or developer-facing platform tooling.

• Contributions to open-source standards or protocol-level infrastructure.

• Experience with Rust, Go, or other systems-level languages.

• Interest in decentralized commerce, identity systems, or reputation networks.

Compensation & Details

Total Rewards Package

We believe in a comprehensive and competitive compensation strategy that rewards talent and drive. Our flexible Total Rewards Package typically includes:

ComponentDescription Base Salary A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards. Performance Bonus Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements. Equity / Stock Options We offer stock options to all full‑time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth.

Comprehensive Benefits

We are committed to the health, well‑being, and long‑term financial security of our team. Benefits coverage typically begins on the first day of employment.

• Health & Wellness: 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees.

• Time Off: Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy

Unless otherwise stated, all roles with Palette Labs are remote-based in the United States with a preference to hire in New York City. We require that you overlap some working hours with Eastern Standard Time (EST).