Every time you use Base, you are using Optimism's code. Same for Worldcoin. Same for Zora, Mode, Mantle, and dozens of other chains most people have never heard of. The OP Stack — the open-source modular framework built by OP Labs — quietly became the default way to launch an Ethereum Layer 2. More chains run on it than any other rollup framework, and that number keeps growing.
Which makes OP Labs one of the most consequential teams in crypto right now. And one of the most interesting places to work if you care about Ethereum scaling, open-source infrastructure, and the kind of engineering problems that only exist when you are building the plumbing for a financial system that processes billions of dollars.
This is what working at Optimism actually looks like — the roles, the culture, the compensation, and what they expect from candidates.
What Optimism Is Building
The name "Optimism" refers to several things at once, which causes some confusion. Let's sort it out.
OP Labs is the software company. Around 150-200 people, primarily engineers and researchers, building the OP Stack. This is where you would work if you got a job. It is a private company with venture funding.
The Optimism Collective is the governance body — a bicameral system (Token House and Citizens' House) that governs the protocol, allocates funding, and runs RetroPGF rounds. OP Labs contributes to the Collective but does not control it.
The OP Stack is the product — an open-source, modular framework for building L2 rollups on Ethereum. It uses optimistic rollups with fault proofs, meaning transactions are assumed valid unless someone submits a fraud proof within a challenge window.
The Superchain is the vision — a network of interoperable L2 chains all running the OP Stack, sharing a security model and able to pass messages natively between each other. Think of it as Ethereum scaling horizontally through many connected rollups rather than one chain trying to do everything.
The numbers tell the story. 138 public GitHub repositories. Over 5,000 stars. The OP Stack powers chains that collectively process more transactions than Ethereum mainnet. When Coinbase — a publicly traded company worth tens of billions — chose to build Base, they chose the OP Stack. That is a level of production validation few open-source projects in crypto can claim.
Engineering Culture
OP Labs is a research-heavy, engineering-first organization. The culture has more in common with an Ethereum research lab than a typical startup. People here tend to care deeply about protocol correctness, formal verification, and getting the incentive design right before shipping.
A few things stand out about working here.
Open source is not a marketing strategy — it is the product. Everything ships to public repos. Your code will be read by hundreds of developers building on the OP Stack, audited by security researchers, and forked by teams launching their own chains. The quality bar is high because the audience is technical and the stakes are real.
Research and engineering are tightly coupled. Protocol engineers at OP Labs do not just implement specs handed down from a separate research team. They participate in the research process, contribute to Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and think about mechanism design alongside implementation. If you want a role where you write code to a specification and go home, this is the wrong place.
Ethereum alignment is a cultural value, not just a talking point. OP Labs builds on Ethereum because they believe in Ethereum's long-term vision for a credibly neutral settlement layer. This matters in practice — decisions about protocol design are filtered through "does this strengthen or weaken Ethereum?" Candidates who are chain-agnostic or primarily motivated by token price tend to self-select out.
The Ethos score backs up the reputation. At 1,856 with a "reputable" rating across 581 reviews and a vouch, OP Labs consistently ranks among the most respected teams in the ecosystem. That reputation is earned through years of shipping in public and contributing upstream to Ethereum.
OP Labs contributed fault proofs to production in 2024, a milestone years in the making. This kind of timeline — deep research leading to careful, staged deployment — is representative of the pace. If you prefer shipping MVPs every two weeks, the tempo here will feel different. The work is methodical because the consequences of getting it wrong are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Roles They Hire
Working at Optimism means working at OP Labs, and the team skews heavily technical. Here are the primary roles they hire for.
Protocol Engineers (Go, Rust)
The core of the team. Protocol engineers work on the OP Stack itself — the node software (op-node, op-geth), the fault proof system, the derivation pipeline, and cross-chain messaging. This is deep systems work. You are writing code that runs on every OP Stack chain, so correctness and performance are paramount.
What they look for: Strong systems programming background. Go is the primary language for the node implementation (forked from geth), with Rust increasingly used for performance-critical components and the fault proof VM. Understanding of Ethereum's execution and consensus layers is expected, not optional.
Smart Contract Engineers (Solidity)
The protocol's on-chain components — the bridge contracts, the dispute game contracts, the SystemConfig — are all Solidity. These contracts secure billions of dollars in bridged assets, so the security bar is extreme.
What they look for: Deep Solidity expertise, experience with upgradeable contract patterns, and an understanding of how L1 and L2 contracts interact across the bridge. Audit experience or competitive audit contest results are strong signals.
Security Engineers and Researchers
With fault proofs live and billions in TVL, the security surface is large and complex. Security roles span smart contract auditing, protocol-level security analysis, bug bounty triage, and formal verification research.
What they look for: Track record in smart contract security, ideally with audit firm experience or high-impact bug bounty findings. Understanding of cryptographic primitives and incentive mechanism analysis.
Research
Dedicated researchers working on consensus mechanisms, proof systems, cross-chain interoperability, and economic mechanism design. Some of this work feeds directly into Ethereum research and EIPs.
What they look for: Academic or applied research background in distributed systems, cryptography, or mechanism design. Published work is valued. The ability to bridge theory and implementation matters — this is not a pure research lab.
Developer Relations and Ecosystem
DevRel at OP Labs means supporting the teams building on the OP Stack — the Base teams, the Worldcoin teams, and the growing number of projects launching their own OP Stack chains. This is a highly technical DevRel function.
What they look for: You need to actually understand rollup architecture, not just explain it at a surface level. Previous experience building on the OP Stack or similar infrastructure is a major advantage.
Tech Stack
The technical stack at OP Labs reflects its roots as an Ethereum infrastructure project.
- Go — Primary language for the node implementation. op-node and op-geth are Go codebases forked from the Ethereum execution and consensus clients.
- Rust — Increasingly used for performance-sensitive components, the fault proof virtual machine (Cannon), and tooling. Rust is growing in importance across the stack.
- Solidity — All on-chain contracts, including the bridge, dispute game, and governance contracts.
- TypeScript — SDK, tooling, monitoring, and developer-facing infrastructure.
- Distributed systems fundamentals — Consensus protocols, state management, peer-to-peer networking, transaction ordering. This is the conceptual foundation beneath the language-specific work.
If you are coming from traditional backend engineering, Go experience translates well. If you are coming from the Ethereum ecosystem, familiarity with geth internals is a significant advantage. Rust is increasingly important but not yet required for most roles.
The Interview Process
Interviewing at OP Labs is technical and values-driven. Expect the process to take 3-5 weeks with multiple stages.
Initial screen: A conversation with a recruiter or hiring manager covering your background, motivation, and basic alignment with the mission. They are screening for genuine interest in Ethereum scaling, not just interest in a paycheck.
Technical deep dive: For protocol engineering roles, expect to discuss rollup architecture in detail. How does the derivation pipeline work? What is the fault proof challenge game? How do sequencer and verifier nodes interact? Surface-level knowledge of "optimistic rollups" is insufficient — they want to know that you have studied the architecture.
Coding assessment: Varies by role. Protocol engineers may work through a systems design problem in Go. Smart contract engineers will likely write and audit Solidity. Expect the problems to be domain-relevant rather than generic LeetCode.
Values and culture fit: OP Labs takes Ethereum alignment seriously in hiring. You do not need to be an Ethereum maximalist, but you need to articulate why you believe in building on Ethereum specifically and why L2 scaling matters for the ecosystem's long-term success. Candidates who view OP Labs as "just another L2 job" do not tend to advance.
Before interviewing, read the OP Stack specification (specs.optimism.io) and the Optimism Collective's governance documentation. Referencing specific architectural decisions or governance proposals in your interview signals that you have done real homework, not just skimmed the landing page.
Team interviews: Conversations with potential teammates focused on collaboration style, technical communication, and how you approach ambiguous problems. OP Labs is remote-first, so the ability to communicate complex technical ideas asynchronously (in writing, in PRs, in specs) is evaluated alongside verbal communication.
Compensation
OP Labs compensation is competitive with top-tier Web3 companies, though the structure reflects the organization's mission-driven nature.
Base salary: Protocol engineers at the senior level can expect $200,000-$280,000+ depending on experience and location. Mid-level engineers typically fall in the $160,000-$220,000 range. These figures are for US-based compensation and may vary for other regions.
OP token component: OP Labs includes an OP token grant as part of total compensation, typically on a 4-year vesting schedule. The size of the grant varies by seniority. At current OP token prices, the token component can add 30-80% on top of base salary for senior roles. Standard caveats about token volatility apply — see our token compensation guide for how to evaluate token grants properly.
Benefits: Standard benefits package including health insurance, generous PTO, and equipment budget. Remote-first with periodic team offsites.
The compensation is strong, but it is not the highest in Web3. Some DeFi protocols and trading firms pay more in raw numbers. People join OP Labs because they want to work on Ethereum scaling infrastructure at the highest level, not because the comp package is the absolute maximum available. If maximizing short-term compensation is your primary criterion, a DeFi protocol or market maker will likely pay more. If you want to build infrastructure that thousands of projects depend on, the tradeoff is worth it.
The Optimism Collective and RetroPGF
One of the genuinely unique aspects of working at OP Labs is the Optimism Collective — the governance system that sits alongside the company.
The Collective runs RetroPGF (Retroactive Public Goods Funding), a mechanism that allocates OP tokens to projects and individuals who have contributed public goods to the ecosystem. The idea is simple and powerful: rather than trying to predict what will be valuable in advance (like traditional grants), fund things retroactively based on demonstrated impact.
This is relevant to working at OP Labs for a few reasons.
First, it shapes the organizational values. The belief that public goods deserve funding — and that impact should be rewarded retroactively — influences how the company thinks about open-source contributions, ecosystem development, and what constitutes valuable work. You feel this in the culture. People talk about impact in terms of what was useful to the ecosystem, not just what shipped internally.
Second, the governance work is real engineering. The Token House and Citizens' House governance systems, the attestation infrastructure, the RetroPGF allocation mechanisms — all of this requires protocol design and implementation. Some of the most interesting work at OP Labs sits at the intersection of governance mechanism design and engineering.
Third, the Collective creates career paths beyond traditional employment. Contributors to the Optimism ecosystem can earn RetroPGF allocations for impactful work. Several current OP Labs employees were active ecosystem contributors before joining full-time. Participating in the Collective — through governance, tooling, or research — is one of the strongest ways to build a relationship with the team before applying.
Is OP Labs Right for You?
Working at Optimism is a specific kind of experience. The engineering is deep, the pace is deliberate rather than frantic, and the culture filters hard for people who care about Ethereum as a long-term project. The open-source nature means your work is public and scrutinized, which is both motivating and demanding.
You will thrive here if you want to work on infrastructure used by dozens of chains and millions of users, if you find protocol-level engineering intellectually satisfying, and if you believe in Ethereum's vision enough to align your career with it.
You will be frustrated here if you want rapid product iteration, consumer-facing features, or a culture that is agnostic about which blockchain wins. OP Labs has strong convictions, and those convictions shape every aspect of the work.
The Superchain vision is ambitious — a network of interoperable L2s that scale Ethereum horizontally. If they pull it off, the people building it will have shaped how a significant portion of the internet's financial infrastructure operates. That is the bet you are making when you join.
Browse open Optimism and OP Labs careers on gm.careers, or explore related roles across L2 infrastructure teams.