How to Apply to Mystenlabs

11 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 11 open positions

Key Takeaways

  • Mysten Labs is the core engineering company behind the Sui blockchain, founded in 2021 by Meta Diem and Novi alumni, and has raised more than 300 million dollars at a private valuation reported above 2 billion dollars.
  • Sui is an object-centric, horizontally scalable Layer 1 built around the Move programming language, the Narwhal and Bullshark consensus stack (now evolving toward Mysticeti), and a parallel execution model designed for consumer-scale throughput.
  • The company recruits heavily for systems engineers, cryptographers, Move and Rust developers, programming language researchers, product leaders, and developer relations, and treats deep technical depth as the default rather than the exception.
  • Interviews are rigorous and engineering-led, with realistic coding tasks in Rust, TypeScript, or Move, protocol and system design rounds grounded in actual Sui problems, and behavioral rounds that screen hard for ownership, intellectual honesty, and long-term builder mindset.
  • Resumes that quantify impact in throughput, latency, users served, total value secured, and gas savings, and that use Sui-native vocabulary like object-centric model, programmable transaction blocks, and zkLogin, score significantly higher in both ATS triage and engineer review.
  • Compensation typically combines a competitive base salary, a meaningful equity grant in Mysten Labs, and a separate SUI token allocation with its own vesting schedule, plus comprehensive benefits and conference and research support.
  • Mysten supports a hybrid culture anchored to specific offices in Palo Alto, New York, Amsterdam, and Athens, with selective fully remote arrangements for senior individual contributors and specialist roles; visa support including H-1B and O-1 is available for qualifying technical hires.
  • Beyond the base protocol, Mysten is building Walrus for decentralized storage, Seal for threshold encryption, Deepbook as a shared on-chain order book, zkLogin for OAuth-based onboarding, and the SuiPlay gaming initiative, all of which create internal mobility paths across very different problem spaces.
  • If you want to do deep technical work on a Layer 1 that takes consumer software, gaming, and real-time finance seriously, and you value calm, rigorous colleagues over performative urgency, Mysten is a strong fit for a multi-year career rather than a short-term resume line.

About Mystenlabs

Mysten Labs is a Web3 infrastructure company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that designs, builds, and operates the Sui blockchain and the surrounding developer platform that brings it to life. The company was founded in 2021 by Evan Cheng, Sam Blackshear, Adeniyi Abiodun, George Danezis, and Kostas Chalkias, all of whom led core engineering and research efforts on Meta's Diem (formerly Libra) and Novi wallet projects before that program was wound down. From day one Mysten has positioned itself not as a chain that grafts smart contracts onto an existing financial protocol but as a horizontally scalable, object-centric Layer 1 designed from first principles for consumer applications, real-time gaming, social experiences, and high-throughput financial use cases. Sui mainnet launched in May 2023 and has since become one of the most active and most technically distinctive networks in the industry, anchored by the Move programming language (originally created at Meta and significantly extended by Mysten as Sui Move), the Narwhal and Bullshark consensus stack, and an object model that allows many transactions to execute in parallel rather than serialize through a single global state machine. Around the protocol Mysten has built a wallet ecosystem (Sui Wallet and zkLogin for passwordless onboarding via OAuth), Walrus for decentralized storage, Seal for threshold encryption, the SuiPlay handheld gaming initiative announced with Playtron, and Deepbook as a shared on-chain order book primitive. The company has raised more than 300 million dollars across rounds led by FTX Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Jump Crypto, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures, and others, and at peak private valuations was widely reported above 2 billion dollars; the public SUI token, distributed by the independent Sui Foundation, has put the network among the larger Layer 1s by market capitalization. The team is roughly 250 people heavy on systems engineers, cryptographers, programming language researchers, and product leaders recruited from Meta, Google, Apple, Coinbase, and academic research labs, and the culture leans serious, technically dense, and shipping-focused. Candidates evaluating Mysten should expect an environment where deep computer science and a long-term builder mindset are the default, where Move and Rust are first-class languages, and where the company is explicitly trying to take Web3 from speculative trading into mainstream consumer software.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Apply through mystenlabs

    Apply through mystenlabs.com/careers, which routes openings through Greenhouse; create a Greenhouse profile with one canonical resume and reuse it across requisitions, since Mysten frequently posts overlapping engineering, cryptography, research, product, and developer relations roles that can take the same baseline materials.

  2. 2
    Expect a recruiter screen within one to three weeks for shortlisted candidates;

    Expect a recruiter screen within one to three weeks for shortlisted candidates; the recruiter will calibrate on location and office expectations (Palo Alto, New York, Amsterdam, Athens, or remote depending on the team), work authorization, compensation including SUI token grants, motivation for Mysten and Sui specifically, and your prior exposure to Web3 or distributed systems.

  3. 3
    Engineering candidates typically complete a take-home or live coding exercise ne

    Engineering candidates typically complete a take-home or live coding exercise next, often in Rust, TypeScript, or Move depending on the team, designed less as a leetcode gauntlet and more as a realistic systems or smart-contract task with attention to correctness, idiomatic style, and test coverage.

  4. 4
    A hiring manager interview follows, focused on prior project depth, experience o

    A hiring manager interview follows, focused on prior project depth, experience operating production systems or shipping smart contracts, and how you reason about consensus, parallel execution, gas economics, security trade-offs, or product surface area depending on the role.

  5. 5
    An onsite or virtual loop of four to six rounds typically includes coding, syste

    An onsite or virtual loop of four to six rounds typically includes coding, system or protocol design, a Move or Rust deep dive for engineering tracks, a research-style discussion with a cryptographer or PL researcher for protocol roles, a behavioral and values round, and a cross-functional conversation with product, developer relations, or business development.

  6. 6
    For senior, staff, principal, and leadership roles a final conversation with a c

    For senior, staff, principal, and leadership roles a final conversation with a co-founder or senior leader is standard, often involving a written or live presentation on past architecture, research, or strategy work and a forward-looking discussion of what you would build at Mysten in the first six to twelve months.

  7. 7
    Offers are typically extended within one to three weeks of the final loop, packa

    Offers are typically extended within one to three weeks of the final loop, packaged as base salary plus a meaningful equity grant in Mysten Labs and a separate SUI token allocation with its own vesting schedule; relocation, hybrid arrangements anchored to a specific office, and visa support including H-1B transfers and O-1 sponsorship are available for senior technical hires.


Resume Tips for Mystenlabs

recommended

Lead with measurable engineering impact rather than responsibilities: throughput

Lead with measurable engineering impact rather than responsibilities: throughput in transactions per second, latency in milliseconds, gas or cost reductions as a percentage, on-chain users or developers served, total value secured, or test coverage and bug-bounty findings on shipped code.

recommended

Show distributed systems and consensus depth explicitly

Show distributed systems and consensus depth explicitly. Mysten cares about BFT consensus, DAG-based protocols, mempool design, gossip, networking, leader election, view changes, and real-world performance under adversarial conditions, and these terms should appear naturally in your bullets when they apply.

recommended

Surface programming language and compiler experience candidly

Surface programming language and compiler experience candidly. Move, Rust, type systems, formal verification, bytecode design, linker and loader internals, and prover-assisted reasoning all map directly to active work at Mysten and should be highlighted with specific projects rather than buzzwords.

recommended

Translate Web2 systems experience into Web3-relevant language

Translate Web2 systems experience into Web3-relevant language. If you have built large-scale backends, payments, gaming, or social platforms, name the throughput and reliability problems you solved and connect them to the consumer-scale ambitions of Sui rather than pretending to have crypto experience you do not have.

recommended

For smart contract and protocol roles, list on-chain work with concrete artifact

For smart contract and protocol roles, list on-chain work with concrete artifacts. Link to GitHub repositories, deployed package addresses on Sui or other chains, audit reports, CTF or Capture-the-Flag-style security competitions, hackathon wins, or open-source contributions to Move, Sui, Aptos, or other relevant ecosystems.

recommended

Include cryptography depth precisely

Include cryptography depth precisely. Threshold signatures, BLS, zkSNARKs, zkLogin and OAuth-based account abstraction, MPC, verifiable random functions, post-quantum primitives, and applied cryptography for storage and messaging are all in scope, and credibility comes from specific protocols implemented or papers co-authored, not a generic crypto label.

recommended

Mirror the vocabulary in the Mysten and Sui documentation: object-centric model,

Mirror the vocabulary in the Mysten and Sui documentation: object-centric model, owned versus shared objects, programmable transaction blocks, Sui Move, Narwhal, Bullshark, Mysticeti, zkLogin, Walrus, Seal, Deepbook, gas budgets, sponsored transactions. Matching this language improves both ATS scoring and engineer review.

recommended

Keep the resume to one or two pages with a clean, conservative layout and consis

Keep the resume to one or two pages with a clean, conservative layout and consistent typography, and link prominently to GitHub, your personal site, published papers, talks, or any production systems you can point to; Mysten engineers often skim links before reading bullets.



Interview Culture

Mysten Labs interviews are deliberately rigorous, technically dense, and grounded in the actual engineering and research problems the company is solving rather than generic puzzle questions.

Expect interviewers to be working engineers, cryptographers, programming language researchers, or product leaders who currently own the systems and roadmaps you would be joining, and expect them to push past your first answer until they understand exactly how you think about correctness, performance, security, and trade-offs at protocol scale. A typical interview opens with a behavioral conversation that quickly turns into a project walkthrough, and your interviewer will keep asking why and what would break if at every layer until the architecture, the failure modes, and the alternatives you considered are fully exposed. Coding rounds tend to focus on data structures, concurrency, parsing, networking primitives, and small systems problems, with an emphasis on correctness, edge cases, idiomatic Rust or Move, and clear reasoning rather than speed-run optimization; for protocol and infrastructure tracks you will frequently be asked to write code that interacts with sockets, files, processes, simple binary formats, or smart contract bytecode rather than pure algorithm puzzles. System and protocol design rounds at Mysten are unusually high-signal because the company actually operates a Layer 1 at meaningful throughput, so expect prompts about designing a BFT consensus protocol with a DAG-based mempool, an object-centric execution engine that supports parallel transactions, a wallet onboarding flow that hides keys behind OAuth, a decentralized storage network with erasure coding, an on-chain order book with sub-second matching, or a sponsored-transaction relayer with abuse resistance; interviewers will probe your understanding of liveness, safety, equivocation, censorship resistance, MEV, cache locality, gas pricing, and graceful degradation. For Move and smart contract candidates expect deep conversations about the type system, capability-based access control, resource semantics, formal verification, and how to design package upgrades that preserve safety. Behaviorally, Mysten screens hard for ownership, intellectual honesty, low ego, written communication, and a long-term builder mindset. Interviewers respond well to candidates who admit what they do not know, describe failures with what they learned, can articulate why crypto matters beyond price action, and demonstrate genuine curiosity about distributed systems and programming languages. They respond poorly to confident bluffing, hype-driven answers, mercenary tone, or contempt for either Web2 or Web3. The tone is professional and technical rather than performative, and decisions are made by full loop debriefs where every interviewer must justify their recommendation with concrete evidence from the conversation.

What Mystenlabs Looks For

  • Engineers and researchers with genuine depth in distributed systems, programming languages, cryptography, or large-scale consumer software, demonstrated through shipped projects, papers, or open-source contributions rather than buzzwords.
  • Hands-on builders who have shipped and operated production systems with real users, real on-call burden, and real consequences for downtime, security incidents, or economic exploits.
  • Pragmatic problem solvers who can balance throughput, latency, security, decentralization, and developer experience without retreating into a single discipline or chasing novelty for its own sake.
  • People who think in microseconds of latency and basis points of gas cost, and who can articulate why a particular protocol or execution choice will or will not survive an adversarial validator set, a viral consumer launch, or a sustained market downturn.
  • Strong written and verbal communicators who can explain complex protocol decisions clearly to developers, validators, exchanges, and partners, since Mysten engineers regularly publish research, RFCs, and documentation that the broader Sui ecosystem depends on.
  • Owners who take end-to-end responsibility, including the unglamorous work of incident response, validator support, audit remediation, ecosystem coordination, and migration of long-lived smart contracts.
  • Collaborative teammates who can work across geographies and time zones, since Mysten teams span Palo Alto, New York, Amsterdam, Athens, and remote contributors and operate with significant async coordination.
  • Candidates with a long-term mindset who are excited by the multi-year arc of taking a Layer 1 from launch to mainstream consumer adoption rather than chasing the next short-term token cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does Mysten Labs use, and how should I apply?
Mysten Labs uses Greenhouse as its applicant tracking system, accessed through mystenlabs.com/careers. Create a single Greenhouse profile so you can apply to multiple roles, upload one canonical resume, and track status for every requisition in one place. Avoid creating duplicate profiles with different email addresses, which fragments your application history and can confuse recruiters when overlapping engineering, research, and product roles open in the same quarter.
Do I need prior crypto or Web3 experience to get hired at Mysten?
No. Mysten hires extensively from Web2 backgrounds, particularly for systems engineering, infrastructure, security, and consumer product roles, on the explicit theory that taking Sui mainstream requires people who have shipped at scale outside of crypto. What matters is demonstrated depth in adjacent areas (distributed systems, programming languages, cryptography, large-scale operations, consumer product) and the ability to reason rigorously about trade-offs. For Move-specific or protocol research roles, prior on-chain experience or relevant academic work helps, but for most engineering tracks it is not required.
What is the relationship between Mysten Labs and the Sui Foundation?
Mysten Labs is the for-profit company that originated and continues to lead the engineering of the Sui protocol, while the Sui Foundation is an independent nonprofit based in the Cayman Islands that manages the public SUI token, ecosystem grants, validator coordination, and broader community development. They are separate legal entities with different mandates, and roles at Mysten are different from roles at the Foundation; if you are unsure which one you should be applying to, the recruiter will help you triangulate based on the kind of work you want to do.
Does Mysten sponsor work visas?
Yes, Mysten routinely sponsors H-1B transfers and O-1 visas for qualifying technical roles in the United States, and supports green card processing for tenured employees. Sponsorship volume varies by team, office, and fiscal year, and certain roles tied to specific offices in Europe (Amsterdam, Athens) follow local immigration tracks instead. Confirm sponsorship eligibility for the specific requisition with your recruiter during the initial screen rather than assuming it from the job posting.
Is Mysten remote, hybrid, or in-office?
Mysten operates a hybrid model anchored to its offices in Palo Alto (headquarters), New York, Amsterdam, and Athens, with most engineering and product roles expecting two to three days per week in the assigned office. Fully remote arrangements are offered selectively for senior individual contributors and specialist roles, particularly in research, cryptography, and developer relations. The job posting and the recruiter screen will specify the expectation for each requisition.
What does the interview loop look like for software engineers?
A typical software engineering loop includes a recruiter screen, a take-home or live coding exercise in Rust, TypeScript, or Move depending on the team, a hiring manager conversation, and an onsite or virtual loop of four to six rounds covering coding, system or protocol design, a Move or Rust deep dive, behavioral, and a cross-functional collaboration round with product or developer relations. Senior, staff, and principal candidates often present past work or architecture deep dives to a panel of senior engineers and a co-founder.
How should I prepare for Mysten system and protocol design interviews?
Mysten system and protocol design rounds are unusually concrete because the company operates a real Layer 1. Prepare by studying BFT consensus and DAG-based protocols (Narwhal, Bullshark, Mysticeti), object-centric execution and parallel transaction processing, the Move type system and resource semantics, gas pricing and economic abstraction, wallet onboarding and zkLogin, decentralized storage primitives such as erasure coding, and on-chain order book design. Be ready to discuss liveness, safety, censorship resistance, MEV, blast radius containment, and graceful degradation, and to defend specific trade-offs rather than recite reference architectures.
What is compensation and equity like at Mysten Labs?
Mysten compensation typically combines a competitive base salary calibrated to office and level, a meaningful equity grant in Mysten Labs that vests over four years on a standard cliff and monthly schedule, a separate SUI token allocation with its own vesting schedule, comprehensive medical and retirement benefits, and learning and research support including conference travel, paper publication, and home-office stipends. Total compensation for senior technical roles in the Bay Area is competitive with top-tier crypto and Web2 companies; specifics vary by role, level, and current SUI market conditions.
What technical skills matter most across Mysten roles?
Across most engineering tracks, the highest-leverage skills are deep distributed systems fundamentals (BFT consensus, replication, mempool design, networking), at least one systems language (Rust strongly preferred, with C, C++, or Go as adjacent), familiarity or willingness to learn Move, applied cryptography (threshold signatures, BLS, zkSNARKs, MPC), and operational maturity demonstrated through on-call experience and incident response. Product, design, and developer relations tracks add consumer onboarding, ecosystem building, technical writing, and partner management.
What is the culture really like and who thrives long term at Mysten?
Mysten's culture is engineering-led, research-aware, methodical, and shipping-focused, with a notable absence of crypto-bro performance and a strong preference for low-ego, high-rigor collaborators. People who thrive long term tend to be deep technical builders who care about correctness and security, who can hold a multi-year roadmap in their head, and who genuinely believe that Web3 will become mainstream consumer software rather than just a trading venue. It is not a hype-driven environment; if you want calm, serious colleagues working on a Layer 1 that takes gaming, payments, and real-time finance seriously, Mysten is a strong fit for a multi-year career.

Open Positions

Mystenlabs currently has 11 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 11 open positions at Mystenlabs

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