Matter Labs careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Matter Labs has raised $258M in equity across four rounds: a $2M seed in September 2019 led by Placeholder with Hashed, Dragonfly, Dekrypt Capital and 1kx; a $6M Series A in February 2021 with Union Square Ventures, Placeholder, Dragonfly and 1kx; a $50M Series B on 8 November 2021 led by Andreessen Horowitz with Placeholder, Dragonfly, 1kx, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, Consensys, Bybit, OKEx, Alchemy, Covalent, Aave, ParaSwap, Lido, Gnosis and Rarible; and a $200M Series C in November 2022 co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly with Variant, a16z and Lightspeed. A separate $200M ecosystem fund announced with the Series C is why press reports often quote $458M, and no valuation has been disclosed. The ZK token launched on 17 June 2024 with 3.6 billion tokens (17.5% of a 21 billion supply) airdropped to 695,232 wallets, and ZK Nation governance funds Matter Labs' protocol work with 67 million ZK a month for 12 months from 2026.

Matter Labs is the engineering company behind ZKsync, the Ethereum scaling network secured by zero-knowledge proofs. It shipped the first public ZK rollup prototype in early 2019, put zkSync Lite on Ethereum mainnet in 2020, built the first practical FPGA-based proof accelerator that same year, and launched ZKsync Era, the first EVM-compatible ZK rollup, on 24 March 2023. The stack underneath it, the ZK Stack, is open source and was used by more than 20 teams including Crypto.com, Abstract, Lens, Deutsche Bank and Xsolla to run their own chains. The October 2025 Atlas upgrade and the Airbender prover brought finality to about one second and throughput of up to 15,000 transactions per second.

Since 2024 the company has been building for regulated financial institutions, and on 17 June 2026 it committed the whole organisation to that work under the Prividium name. Prividium is a private, permissioned chain that runs inside a bank's own infrastructure, anchors every transaction to Ethereum and uses zero-knowledge proofs so a counterparty can verify a transaction without seeing the data. Deutsche Bank's DAMA 2 tokenised fund project and a UBS digital gold proof of concept ran on ZKsync technology; Cari Network, the bank-governed tokenised deposit network founded by former US Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig, adopted Prividium in March 2026 with five regional banks holding $779 billion in combined deposits and by July counted more than 30 committed institutions, targeting full production in Q4 2026. BitGo announced a joint tokenised deposit stack with ZKsync in March 2026, Prividium completed a SOC 2 Type I examination as of 29 May 2026 with Type II under way, and in September 2026 the Deutsche Bundesbank became the first institution to deploy Prividium's newly open-sourced permissioning engine (Apache 2.0) self-hosted in its own environment.

Alex Gluchowski, CEO and co-founder. Ukrainian-born software architect who started as a junior developer in Kyiv in 2003, led a 20-person engineering team across Kyiv and Ho Chi Minh City as Head of Software Engineering at Clarity AG in Bad Homburg (2007 to 2009), then was CTO of ExpoGlobus, co-founder and CTO of Somuchmore (acquired by Rocket Internet) and co-founder and CTO of the camper-van marketplace PaulCamper until 2017, and Director of R&D at Entropy Labs before founding Matter Labs in December 2018. M.Sc. in Computer Science from Technische Universität Berlin (2009 to 2011).

Alexandr Vlasov, Head of R&D and co-founder. Physicist turned cryptography engineer who wrote the early zkSNARK tooling in Rust, ran the March 2019 EDCON workshop on constructing practical zkSNARKs for Ethereum and has spoken publicly on recursive SNARKs. Specialist degree in nuclear and particle physics from Lomonosov Moscow State University (2006 to 2012) and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal (2013 to 2018).

Matter Labs has eight years of production zero-knowledge infrastructure behind it and is now pointing that at settlement between banks, so the customers are clearing houses, custodians and a central bank rather than DeFi users. The Forward Deployed Engineer posting describes the job as taking Prividium "from a signed deal to a live chain inside their environment" for banks moving real value, and says what it wants plainly: people who "would rather ship a rough working version on Thursday than present a diagram on Friday", and "the rarest trait is taste: seeing the good general solution inside a hard set of constraints and telling it apart from the merely clever one."

The team is small for the footprint, around 70 people according to current postings, and the security organisation is described as "deliberately lean, high-leverage": "You won't be one of fifty detection engineers." Pay is location-blind for at least some roles; the Protocol Security Engineer posting states "Matter Labs applies no geographic pay discounts." Bank-side hires do not need crypto experience: the same Forward Deployed Engineer posting says "No blockchain experience required. We will teach you the stack," and strongly encourages former founders to apply.

Matter Labs' careers page names its values as "purposefulness, creativity, directness, minimalism, initiative, and BS-intolerance," adds that the team respects "paranoid adversarial thinking" because it is in the business of security, and sums up the operating model as "freedom plus a result-first mindset: what matters is getting things done." Every current posting repeats the same line: "no time tracking, minimum bureaucracy, only results matter." Earlier postings framed the same idea as three values, freedom, ownership mindset and meritocracy, and said the company screens every hire for signals that a candidate will thrive in that culture.

The public team handbook opens with the founders' reason for the company: "Alex V. and I (Alex G.) founded Matter Labs because we love freedom: the ability to do what you want and not do what you hate," and describes a team of self-motivated people who "enjoy the highest degree of autonomy." An older posting spells out one norm most companies leave unsaid: "out of politeness and respect, we refrain from opinions on politics, religion, or sex at the workplace." The company's working language is English.

Matter Labs hires through its own Ashby board and internal talent team, and its published agency policy says it does not accept resumes from recruiters. Postings list requirements under the heading "Each of these is a demonstrated capability, shown through work you have done," so expect to walk through real work rather than credentials; the Protocol Security posting counts "public security research, audit reports, bug-bounty results, or CTF history" as evidence and wants findings you can explain "mechanism by mechanism." The company does not publish its interview stages.

Some roles are deliberately split: the Forward Deployed Engineer posting is hiring two people, one from banking infrastructure (core banking, custody, ISO 20022, procurement) and one from crypto infrastructure (Ethereum clients, reth, Rust in production), and says "Depth in one is what matters." Sales roles ask for 8+ years of enterprise B2B selling into banks with closed six- or seven-figure agreements, and note that "Proven institutional-sales performance matters more" than blockchain background. The postings close with "If you meet most of these and believe you can do this job, apply anyway."