Alejandro from Synthetix is looking for a smart contract engineer trainee

About Me and why am I mentoring

Hi I’m Ale, a.k.a. The Ethernaut, I guess I could say the one who started all this :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I designed the mechanics, and wrote most of the levels on https://ethernaut.zeppelin.solutions/.
I also wrote a series of educational articles about Ethereum:

I’ve been in crypto since 2017, worked with OpenZeppelin for 2 years as a smart contract auditor, with Aragon for a year as a smart contract dev, and now with Synthetix as a… ninja? Before that I did a few years of iOS development focused on audio/music applications, and before that I maitained a 3D rendering engine for Flash. (Yes Flash :sweat_smile: !!!).

For some very strange reason, I love teaching, and some say I am pretty good at it.

I’ve recently mentored two Senior devs that knew nothing about Ethereum a couple of months ago; Leo and Mati, who are now making some serious contributions to Synthetix. It was actually mentoring them when I realized that we could scale this process up and thus called up some friends and formed the EthernautDAO.

Training Will/Won’t be for a protocol

I’ll be training you in the same way I trained Leo and Mati. Trying to get you to contribute to Synthetix as quick as possible.

Number of trainees: (max 2 advised)

One only, for now.

Training Will/Won’t target a job position

The ideal outcome of the mentoring program will be to make you a core contributor of the Synthetix protocol.

Target position will/won’t be remote

110% remote.

Minimum requirements for trainee candidates

You need to be a Senior dev. Already a ninja coder. I will only be giving you the Ethereum adapter in a super accelerated pace. I wont be teaching you how to code.

To me, a senior developer is a person that is a master at divide and conquer problem solving. I can throw you any problem, and you can systematically split it into a set of smaller problems, of which at least one you CAN solve. Then repeat the process on all the sub-problems that you can’t solve. If this is a natural thing for you in software development, then you are a compatible candidate.

Also, familiarity with Javascript :pray:

And also, extensive experience with open source and remote team work. I expect you to have the necessary soft skills for working with a remote team.

Mentoring hours per week

Mentoring will be at most 2-3 hours per week of pure call time. Mostly to explain the bizarre corners of the Ethereum virtual machine, ecosystem stuff, etc. I.e. to give you the content that is not yet out there in written form, to unblock you, etc.

Work hours per week expected

The idea will be to start with a few mentoring calls, and quickly come up with some sort of work test or hacking project. You can dedicate the amount of hours you like to this project (as well as learning), but I’ll expect you to be able to dedicate more and more hours a week as the program evolves positively.

By the end of the program, and by the time Synthetix considers making you a core contributor in the protocol, I expect a rather high commitment of time, around half time or 20 hours a week. This obviously depends on how well you’re doing, and how confident you feel about ultimately nailing the end goal.

The hours dedicated to the program will be compensated.

Duration of the program

About two months, but could be less, depending on how quickly you start contributing to the protocol, making PRs, etc.

Trainee contribution expected during the training program

A simple work test, something fun, that demonstrates that you understand Ethereum.

Small PRs to the actual Synthetix protocol like script improvements, tidy ups, increased test coverage, etc.

Salary Range

100k++ depending on how well you do on the program.

Protocol equity position

Yes, TBD by the Synthetix protocol DAO.

To apply, please reply in the comments with a description about yourself

6 Likes

Hi Ale,

My name is Agustin, I am a full stack software developer from Argentina. At the moment, I am working with React + React Native + Elixir (5 years).

Currently I am studying Solidity and core fundamentals from Ethereum, also I’ve been doing the ethernaut levels. I’ve been using React with Hardhat for Dapps integration.

I’ve been in DeFi since early 2020 and now I am starting to introduce the technology in my current job. I would love to learn more about this ecosystem. I can privately send you my CV if you need it.

Hope to be your trainee!

1 Like

Hi Ale,

Senior Technical Engineer with 7 years IT solutions experience

Dev experience is quite low, but I am a fast learner

  • Crypto Zombie Advanced Completed
  • Chainlink Bootcamp Completed
  • Currently working to solve Ethernaut challenges

Hope you consider, look forward to an opportunity

Tc

1 Like

I am a full-stack (Elixir/PHP) + (JS/TS) engineer, for over 20 years, as a freelancer. At one time, I managed a remote team of 4 other developers in the company I co-founded, but have since scaled back to solo. I recently went from knowing nothing to deploying a large-scale Elixir application on AWS in about 6 months. I am quite adept at the skill you mention of breaking down problems until it becomes solvable. Since I’ve been remotely solo for the majority of my career, I’ve learned how to sell, communicated and problem solve using remote-friendly tools. Since falling down the rabbit hole that is Ethereum, I’ve been learning all aspects of using and developing on Ethereum, and it is my goal to make Blockchain development the next step in my career as soon as is possible.

Thank you for your consideration.

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Hi Ale,

First of all, Thank you for the Ethernaut levels.

Background : I’m currently working as a full stack developer(3 Yrs) (Remote since last year). The tech stack is node.js in backend, React.js in frontend, MSSQL/PG as database. Before that I completed my masters degree in CS, focusing on security and cryptography.

Blockchain exp : I started writing solidity with cryptozombies, and then with Ethernaut levels, along with other tutorials. This days I am using Hardhat and React for Dapps. Started attending Eth-global hackathons, and currently I’m exploring the evm + security part.

Hope to get you as a mentor.

Thanks for your time.

1 Like

Hi Ale,

I am a Software developer with 5 years of experience now, working remotely since February 2020 (first due to Covid, and now permanently). I definitely fit into the definition of a Senior dev.

I started my journey with blockchain tech 6 months ago, and went through some popular beginner resources (including https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/ :slight_smile: ). I understood the fundamentals through the ethereum book, and MIT’s course Blockchain and Money. I now spend about 4 hours/day learning about Solidity, defi, and more concepts like MEV, and different stablecoin protocols. I have also used a few defi dapps.

I participated as a solo hacker in HackMoney, where my project won some sponsor prizes. The project involved developing on react-js, and solidity, meta-transactions, and Compound Protocol.

My aim is to enter this space full-time asap, and for that it would be great to have your guidance. From your description about the mentorship style, I think it would a great fit. Thanks!

Hey Ale,

My name is Zach and I’m a software engineer with around 3 years of experience doing backend engineering from in house financial programs to developing and deploying a new AWS service to writing programs to interact with ethereum and even writing smart contracts. Most of what I’ve learned about smart contracts has been from forums, open zeppelin docs and workshops, on my current job, and I even took a class at university. My goal is to get a deeper understanding of the EVM and be a more efficient and knowledgable smart contract engineer.

Cheers!

1 Like

Hello Ale,
reading through your post makes me feel, that I should try to apply to be your padawan.
Im developer since I got my first ZX Spectrum back in 1989, I got Masters Degree in Informatics, and went from Basic, Pascal, C, C++, C#, Java, Python (all of that on a school or hobby projects) to my main career as an ABAP developer for SAP. Then as an Integration consultant to my current position as Senior Solution Designer for SAP Cloud Solutions in a small SAP consultancy company here in Prague (Czechia). Javascript, Cloud Foundry, SAPUI5 and plethora of other services, environments and platforms are my daily bread. Part of my job is also Tech evangelist - enlightening the dull and conservative world of SAP customers with modern technologies with cloud solutions as a flagship. My main hobby is learning - which is also a necessity when you work in IT. This is my main driver and the first few projects on a newly mastered technology are my favorite drug. But that also means, that I usually move further after some time - if projects allows me - to the new and shiny piece of tech ahead. Sometimes its my best quality, sometimes the worst nightmare. But few things stay rock solid - programming as a process, analytical thinking (my wife always laughs at me when I even analyze recipe for spaghetti) and with that - making complicated things simpler. Im usually slower at a start, because I have to get into problem and make a mental model in my head, but it usually pays off at later stages.
Im in crypto from early january 2018 - gone through all the ICO madness (that costs me few bucks), have been hodling eth and btc all the boring bear market, found out, that Im not trader (costs me another few bucks) made my crypto zombies back in early 2019 till I recently discovered, that eth can be much more fun than just hodl. I dived into the most exciting world of multi layered asset valuation strategies, based on incredible rich ecosystem of possibilities, niches and synergies. It really pleased my heart to find such big, and whole new, playground. So much toys to play :slight_smile:

Honestly - I got pretty intensive daily job (several projects right now and whole team depends on my outputs and support) so this potential padawanship would be pretty on the edge (timewise) for me, but I spent all my spare time in the defi world anyway and I enjoy it so much, so I`m willing to change few hours of sleep for that opportunity.

I`m currently working on kind of wallet/portfolio tracking/analysis tool - because I really like Fantom Opera network which lacks good tools like this, and also started working on Index vault DApp - also specific for Fantom.

Seems, that its little bit lengthy introduction - so I will better end it right now.

Best regards and have a nice day

Vlado

1 Like

Hey Ale!

I’m Aleks and I would be honoured to be able to join you as a ninja trainee!

I’m a web developer with 6 years of experience working on high traffic apps. I’ve been bitten by the blockchain bug sometime in 2017 and slowly started dipping my toes in the space. I believe so much in the potential of decentralization that I’ve recently quit my job to dedicate all my professional time to the Ethereum ecosystem. Ethernaut is a golden opportunity for us devs who wish to make the switch and I find it awesome that you and all the other organizers took the time to build this amazing program :pray:t2:

I share your vision of the senior software engineer being a problem solver. I love the struggle of tackling new problems and designing solutions that are (hopefully) elegant. I’m quite comfortable with JavaScript and I have lots of free time and desire to contribute to the ecosystem.

Looking forward to the opportunity and best of luck to all the candidates!

1 Like

Hi Alejandro,

I already applied for Alberto’s position, but I think it’s fair that I also give you the opportunity to hire me :slight_smile:

My name is Manu, I have been working as a Senior Frontend Developer for the last five years, before that I worked in finance for a European firm. I studied economics, but I decided to switch into programming as I’ve always enjoyed technology and computers, and something was missing in my professional career.
Now, after one year being almost obsessed with all the Blockchain ecosystem as a user, I feel it is the right time to start learning Solidity and contribute to the space professionally. I’ve already started to read all the Ethereum official docs and did the first steps on the cryptozombies course.

I have a strong knowledge of ReactJS and Typescript and I also did some work with Java and NodeJS on the Backend. Testing, doing code reviews, using tools like Jira and working remotely are normal things on my daily basis.

I am currently in the UTC+2 timezone, but open to travel if necessary. On a more personal note, travelling is one of my passions, so that wouldn’t be a problem at all!

It would be great if you select me for the program.

Gracias!

1 Like

Hi Ale,

I’m Owleksiy, a generalist SW developer with 15+ years of experience. Backend (high-performance high-availability distributed systems, heavy business logic services, etc), a bit of embedded systems experience, some experience with frontend.

Top strengths: prototyping, getting things done quickly and then converting them to a production-level solution, flexibility. Striving in high uncertainty scenarios: problems without clear visible solutions are my bread and butter.

Halfway through your Ethernaut challenge, have a few ideas for new levels :slight_smile:

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Hi Ale,

I am a senior full-stack software engineer and part-time maker. I have worked professionally in various industries for over 10 years and have experience building back end services, web applications, mobile apps, API’s, auth servers, cloud-based apps and creating/managing deployment pipelines. I’ve spent a lot of my career building with the Microsoft tech stack but have solid javascript experience and have experience with react.js.

I enjoy learning and have endless curiosity, this keeps me motivated especially when I encounter issues I have never faced or foreign concepts. I spend a lot of my spare time building in some way or form as I have a genuine passion for software development and enjoy it. I have worked on a couple of my own ideas and have helped others to bring their ideas to life.

I believe I’ll be the ideal candidate as I have already started building on Ethereum and understand some core concepts. I worked on a fork of Uniswap and modified how orders were sent so they were saved as signed transactions to allow them to be sent at a later date. Doing this work forced me to dig into the code base and docs in order to understand how the Uniswap DApp actually works and interacts with its smart contracts when an order is made. I also developed a new appreciation for the openness of smart contracts as when I have an issue/error I can simply go to the block explorer and look at the contract source code to help figure out the issue. This work gave me real-world experience with concepts and tools, such as ethers.js and hardhat, that I have learned about in multiple tutorials.

I am a passionate, motivated individual and can assure you that you won’t be disappointed by taking me on as your mentee :slight_smile:

Website: https://bayological.eth.link/

1 Like

Hello Alejandro,

  • I am Balaji Shetty Pachai. I am associated with Ethereum & Smart Contract Development since 2017 and have contributed to Openzeppelin-contracts in the past. I am an Arctic Code Vault Contributor.

  • I have 5.3+ years of software development experience and a big fond of smart contract development and Ethereum to be specific.

  • I am proficient at Smart Contract Development (Solidity), Javascript (Node.js) to list a few.

  • Github

  • LinkedIn

  • Medium

If you find me a good fit, let us connect to discuss further.

Stay Safe. Speak Soon.

Regards,
Balaji Shetty Pachai

1 Like

Hi, I’m James.

Senior backend developer with strong mathematics background which makes bug fixing and problem solving my strength in Web Development.

I major in Php and Javascript and a freelance bug fixer at moment.
Started solidity 2 years back and deployed few contracts for some organizations.

Picked interest in smart contract auditing few weeks back, solving ethernaut led me to ethernautdao, lol

( After solving a few levels on ethernaut, I noticed the author’s name [you], follow via github to explore your repositories, saw ethernautdao, found more resources, did a Google search on EthernautDAO, got the launch post, joined on discord )

I love researching.

1 Like

Hello Ale,

I have a PhD in computer science - computer vision and 20 years of work experience in computer programming on different fields of software engineering. Roles spread from software development to project management and consulting, 10+ years in senior roles (tech. lead and/or proj. mgmt.).

For the past 10 years I work as a consultant mostly in the fields of computer vision and machine learning. I am an expert in computer vision, machine learning, c++, python, linux, java, javascript, php, OpenCV, matlab, deep learning, tensorflow, keras.

I’ve been superficially following crypto since 2013, starting with bitcoin trading, then writing trading bots. Latelly - since 2019, I am more closely following and learning ethereum and defi ecosystem, I consider myself an advanced defi user and I develop and run market making bots on ethereum, polygon, loopring, currently working on integrating support for optimism:)

I have very little experience with solidity and would love to learn it through a practical approach like this mentoring program. I hope you consider me as a candidate.

Regards!

1 Like

Hi Ale,

My name is David Killen. I live just outside of Sydney, Australia. I wrote my first computer programs on an Apple IIc in the mid 1980’s. Since then I completed a degree in Information Technology majoring in Software Engineering. As a software engineer I have worked in banking and finance. I’ve worked on technical analysis software used in trading rooms across the globe, banking systems for one of Australia’s largest banks, and spent a few years in IT management, which included a good share of development work. I’ve used many languages over the years including C++, C#, PHP, Python, and JavaScript/TypeScript. Recently, I have been working doing some full stack development with MEAN and MERN stacks. I am also a qualified and practicing commercial and intellectual property lawyer.

I became interested in blockchain in the early days of Bitcoin and tried mining for short time. Shortly after that I began law studies. Over the last 4-5 years I became more interested in blockchain because of its potential in areas such as provenance and asset tracking. My first introduction to smart contracts was experimenting with Hyperledger Fabric. That quickly led into Ethereum and my dormant interest in finance was piqued when I discovered DeFi. Over the last 18 months, I’ve been working to learn as much as I can about the Ethereum ecosystem, DeFi, Solidity and smart contract development as I can. I’ve so far completed 12 levels of Ethernaut. I’ve developed a few contracts incorporating OpenZeppelin contracts. A good example of one of those projects that I’ve been working on is this https://github.com/dkillen/eth-lottery

I currently have two days a week free to devote to learning smart contract development and working on projects. But, my goal is to do this full time. I’m ready and excited to start working in DeFi and really hope you consider me for mentoring. Thanks!

1 Like

Hello Alejandro,

I am Thanos, passionate about open source and giving back to the community. I’ve been authoring open source libraries for over a decade and contributed to many small and major open source packages on the node.js ecosystem (socket.io, mongoose, sequelize).

Since 2014 I’ve been working with early to mid stage startups, building their product, teams and operations. Training engineers to go to the next level, from Junior to Intermediate, Intermediate to Senior and Senior to the next level. Before that, I was working as an engineer, hustler and studied business as a side-gig. In 2019 I decided to get out of my successful web-dev career after multiple burn-outs, working with first-time founders and discovered DeFi.

It’s been a few months that I made the decision to jump full on onto DeFi and have started ramping up my skills. Created a Liquidity discovering bot, watchit, that’s also available on SNX Discord; to learn working with the blockchain. Created a Uni V3 price calculating library during my study on how to work with Uni V3 (still figuring it out).

I finished the cryptozombies tutorial and doing the Ethernaut now. I also managed to port AAVE Flash Loan example to hardhat and make it build successfully.

Finally, I’ve been an active member on SNX discord, mostly trying to understand what is what, the culture and how a DAO operates.

I’d be thrilled and honored to further my studies alongside such an experienced engineer like you as well as work for SNX.

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I’m a passionate coder with a strong tradfi background in derivatives. It would be a dream come true to be able to work and learn with you.

My timeline to date:

  • After university, worked as a CPA/Auditor at Deloitte, specializing in security valuation and investment companies

  • Risk Management/Contoller for Interest Rate and Credit Derivatives at Morgan Stanley on Wall Street

  • Left corporate world to become a digital nomad based in Vietnam developing trading bots for stonks

  • Pivoted to full time web developer – now a U.S. based Tech Lead with 5+ years of experience using Typescript/React, Python/Django for a tradfi SaaS company (fully remote)

Always learning, always writing tests, plan first then code, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Currently studying Solidity every day. Completed CryptoZombies, Ethernaut OpenZeppelin, tutorials on Ethereum.org, and Chainlink Smart Contract Bootcamp. Currently working through Stephen Grider’s Solidity course on Udemy.

If chosen I would fully commit myself, night and day to be the best I can be and begin adding value to Synthetix as quickly as possible.

1 Like

Hi Ale,
My name is Asgeir. I have been a developer for seven years.

The first thing I did after finishing school in 2014 was creating a service called TradersBit (take a look at the tb-back and tb-front projects on my GitHub). It was a marketplace for streams of Bitcoin trading signals.

Then I worked as a software development consultant from 2016 to 2019. During this period, I was also involved in starting a full-stack Web3 development collective called dOrg (https://www.dorg.tech) and did a little work in Solidity.

For the last two years, I have worked as a Data Scientist for a legacy bank and have been away from crypto in terms of development.

I have recently scaled back my position at the bank from 100% to 60% to get back into crypto.

I am currently getting up to speed with Solidity and did a hack for HackMoney (where I got the second prize from Enzyme finance) (GitHub - sogasg/enzyme-protocol: Enzyme Protocol Implementation).

Having somebody with your experience help guide me through my journey into becoming a ninja ethereum developer sounds like a dream scenario to me.

I have experience with several languages; however, TypeScript/JS and Python are the languages I have worked the most with for the last couple of years.

GitHub: sogasg (as you can see, my activity went down when starting my position at the bank).
LinkedIn: sogasg
Twitter: sogasg
asgeir.eth
cluda.eth

** had a limit of two links

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Hi,

I have several years freelance full-stack JS experience with a focus on front-end. Most exposure is React/Node. Have had a couple roles as an SDE in traditional Ecommerce. One as a front-end dev building data dashboards, another as a back-end dev working on tax-related micro-services as part of a DDD architecture. I have also built games in the wild including a Blockchain-based game, was a designer and front-end developer back then. For a time was also focused on competitive programming. Have worked remotely most of my adult life.

Have been paying attention to the ecosystem for a while, learning about projects including Synthetix. Am flexible and can dedicate full-time hours from the onset.

Thansks,

1 Like