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.
What "Ship something visible" looks like. 14 PRs by abhicris merged in the last 30 days — frontier OSS, partner orgs (Lux), and our own Cryptuon ecosystem. Each entry links to the merged PR.
solana-foundation/anchor · 2026-05-08
A loose ends_with("invoke [1]") pre-filter was admitting program logs that the strict CPI-pop regex would then reject — and the unwrap panicked any active event listener. Replaced with the regex match itself, plus a regression test for the offending log line. Closes #4461 — protects every dApp consuming events through anchor-client.
MystenLabs/sui-rust-sdk · 2026-05-05
Added with_headers, bearer_auth, basic_auth, and extend_headers, mirroring the HeadersInterceptor API already on sui_rpc::Client. Re-exports reqwest::header so callers don't take a direct dep. Four wiremock round-trip tests included. Closes #243 — anyone hitting an authenticated GraphQL gateway (Triton, Quicknode, multi-tenant deploys) no longer has to monkey-patch reqwest.
luxfi/ai · 2026-04-22
Replaced three // TODO: Integrate ... stubs in pkg/miner with a backend.InferenceBackend interface. Two reference backends ship in-tree: noop (byte-identical to the old stubs, default) and openai — a stdlib net/http adapter that covers llama.cpp, vllm, ollama, LocalAI, and OpenAI via OPENAI_API_BASE. No new go.mod deps. Miner now runs real inference; +1231/-23 across 9 files.
luxfi/threshold · 2026-04-22
Closes #4 with a 518-line docs/hsm-integration.md. States the truth — every Config (CMP/FROST/LSS/Doerner/Ringtail) exposes MarshalBinary/UnmarshalBinary, so HSMs are a storage + access-control boundary, not a compute boundary. Defines a ShareStore adapter interface (matching luxfi/mpc/pkg/hsm) and walks through AWS CloudHSM, Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud HSM, and Zymbit end-to-end.
cryptuon/tesseract · 2026-04-23
Replaced 3 sunset testnets (Mumbai 80001, Arbitrum Goerli, Optimism Goerli) with Amoy, Arbitrum Sepolia, Optimism Sepolia. Added Base Sepolia + Mainnet, missing Arbitrum One + Optimism Mainnet configs. MATIC → POL. New validate_networks.py pre-flights for deprecated chains, dupes, and dead RPCs. Restores the multi-chain deploy flow on current L2s — anyone trying to deploy with the old config was hitting dead RPCs.
Smaller upstream-hygiene PRs from the contrib-bot rotation. Same author, same window — different size class.
run.go to unblock golangci-lint Go-version mismatchyour-org URLs with real repo pathsgit clone instructions to use real URLand and + missing of in code-interpreter promptthe the duplicates, including a misleading assertion errorheight)support word in voice-pipeline interruptions sectionFive 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.