Hiring
kcolbchain hires through proof of work. We route every role — engineering lead, mid engineer, community ops, OSS contributor — through merged PRs and shipped artifacts first. Strangers don't get into our inner circle; people who ship into it.
If you want the volunteer / fellowship side first, that's /join. Below are the paid tracks.
One funnel. The same loop carries fellowship and paid work — what changes is how loaded the contract gets.
Open a PR against any kcolbchain repo, or against an upstream repo we touch (Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel AI, Nous, Coinbase, Foundry, OP, 0xPlaygrounds — see /reports). One real merged PR beats a CV. The open invitations board is the easiest entry.
Newcomer (1 merged PR) → Regular (2–4) → Fellow (5+). Fellows are the first-invite pool for paid research, partner-org work, and grant milestones — see the contribution & incentives policy.
Once you're known to the team, we route bounties, partner-project sub-scopes, and grant milestones to you. Paid scope-by-scope first; clear deliverable, clear payment, no commitment beyond it.
For the people who consistently land scoped work and want to go deeper, we offer monthly retainers and full-time roles. Comp is benchmarked, location-flexible, and discussed once both sides have signal — never via a cold form.
Five tracks we're actively scaling into. None are "open req" boxes — apply by shipping.
Owns a partner engagement end-to-end. Architecture, code review, IC depth, plus enough product judgement to push back. Rust + Solidity strong; Python and TypeScript fluent. Signal: Fellow ladder + a substantive merged PR on a partner repo.
Executes scoped work under a lead. Strong in at least one of: Rust, Solidity, Python, TypeScript. Comfortable with Foundry, anvil, hardhat, async Python, and modern TS toolchains. Signal: Regular ladder + clean PRs in Q2 repos.
Runs the abhicris-style frontier-PR cadence on behalf of a partner org. Reads issue queues, mirrors adjacent correct paths, ships small but real fixes daily. Signal: a streak of merged PRs across at least three different upstream orgs in any 30-day window.
Owns contributor recruitment, issue triage, hackathon and bounty design, plus the public ship-report loop for a partner. Writing matters. Signal: a public artifact (Discord-run, hackathon, bounty program) you can point us at.
Runs partner-facing events — workshops, hackathon tracks, AMAs, IRL meetups in India / SE Asia / US — and the on-the-ground dev-rel that converts them into contributors. Signal: at least one event you ran end-to-end, plus the post-event writeup.
Sources senior and mid blockchain engineers from the open contributor pool and our network, vets them through real merged PRs, and matches into partner engagements. Signal: a placement track record, or sustained contributor-recruitment activity in any open-source ecosystem.
Long-form writeups, reproducible experiments, EIP-track work. Joins on a per-paper basis, sometimes with a partner-org grant attached. Signal: one published technical artifact (paper, dissertation, multi-month blog series, EIP draft).
Half-engineer, half-account-owner. Embedded with a partner team, runs the kcolbchain side of the engagement, translates between their PMs and our ICs. Signal: prior engineering + prior client-facing experience, plus clear writing.
We don't publish numbers. We do publish how the model works, so you know what to expect.
Default mode. You take a defined deliverable; we agree on scope, timeline, and price up front. Paid on completion, USDC or wire. No retainer floor.
Once a few scope deliveries are clean, we move to a monthly retainer for predictable hours per partner engagement. Re-evaluated each quarter against actual load.
For sustained 1.0-FTE load, full-time at benchmarked rates, location-flexible, with grant or partner-program participation where it fits. We treat this as a decision both sides have to earn into.
Where partner engagements include warrant or token allocations, eligible roles share in those alongside cash — terms case-by-case, never a substitute for the cash floor.
The only application that beats this email is a merged PR.
Best path: pick a repo from the directory or an item from /invitations/, open a PR, and ping us at projects@kcolbchain.com with the link. We reply when there's signal, not on a hiring cadence.
If your fit is research, partner liaison, or community ops where a PR isn't the right artifact, send the artifact you do have plus a 3-line note on which lane you're targeting.
