The Monad Foundation is a team of dedicated ecosystem and community builders who are on a mission to massively grow the impact of decentralized tech. We believe that the Monad blockchain--the performant and parallel EVM Layer 1--will help decentralized apps eat the world.
DeFi on Monad is live. Protocols are deploying. Now the real work begins.
We're looking for a DeFi Success Lead to own Monad Foundation’s strategy for supporting the growth of Monad's DeFi ecosystem - not just what lands on the chain, but how deep it goes. You'll work directly with the protocols already building on Monad to help them grow their TVL, expand their product surface, and unlock the integrations that make each one more valuable than it could be in isolation.
A core pillar of this role is plugging real-world assets into DeFi. You'll connect tokenized asset issuers - treasuries, credit, fund products - with the lending protocols, yield vaults, and liquidity infrastructure on Monad that can make those assets productive onchain. You've probably already done some version of this. You know how RWA looping strategies work, how collateral gets structured in lending markets, and how to get institutional capital comfortable deploying into DeFi.
This role reports to the VP of Go-to-Market and sits at the center of Monad's ecosystem strategy. You'll be the person protocol teams call when they want to grow — and you'll have the Foundation's resources and network to help them make it happen.
Own protocol growth end-to-end. Build tailored growth plans with DeFi protocols on Monad - collaborating on liquidity incentive and co-incentive campaign structures, identifying missing integrations, and tracking TVL and volume against targets. You're not handing protocols off after they launch; you're accountable for their success.
Build the RWA x DeFi flywheel. Source and manage relationships with tokenized asset issuers and connect them with the right lending protocols, yield vaults, and stablecoin infrastructure on Monad. Design the looping strategies and collateral structures that make RWAs composable and yield-generating onchain - not just listed.
Connect the dots across the ecosystem. Identify cross-protocol opportunities that create compounding value - pairing a lending market with a DEX for deeper liquidity loops, or connecting a yield vault with an RWA issuer to expand TVL. You'll see the ecosystem as a system, not a list of individual protocols.
Bring institutional capital onchain. Work with institutional LPs, asset managers, and capital allocators to identify opportunities to deploy into RWA-backed DeFi products on Monad. You're comfortable in both the DeFi-native and TradFi-adjacent worlds, and can speak credibly to both.
You've spent meaningful time inside DeFi collaborations or ecosystem growth -working with a Layer 1, Layer 2, or major protocol affiliated org - and you have a track record of growing TVL and user activity, not just signing deals
You've worked with RWA protocols or tokenization platforms before and understand how tokenized assets move from issuance into productive DeFi yield - collateral structures, redemption mechanics, oracle dependencies and all
You understand how lending markets, AMMs, yield vaults, and liquidity incentives interact - and you can diagnose why a protocol isn't growing and propose concrete solutions to fix it
You've worked with institutional counterparts - asset managers, family offices, or similar - and know how to get capital comfortable with DeFi-native infrastructure
You operate with high autonomy, hold yourself accountable to metrics, and treat protocol success as your own
Challenging problems. You’ll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact.
Huge opportunity. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard is ubiquitous, but existing EVM-compatible chains are slow and bandwidth-constrained. Monad’s core innovations offer developers the best of both worlds (portability and performance) and are a game-changer for mass user adoption in crypto.
The right team. You’ll be part of an exceptional and highly-motivated team
Culture We’re a lean team working together to achieve very ambitious goals. We are united in our culture of collaboration, low ego, and high-quality output. As an early member of our team, you’ll help continue to shape our culture.
Category Labs (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to design and build step-function improvements over existing blockchain solutions. Such greenfield systems include from-scratch databases, Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus mechanisms, JIT compilers for EVM bytecode, and much more.
We recently raised $225M in series A funding, and are backed by Paradigm, Electric Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and others.
Category Labs is building the next generation of blockchain infrastructure with Monad, an EVM-compatible layer 1 that dramatically improves performance. Deep optimization is needed across all levels of the stack - from the database layer, to the virtual machine layer, to the consensus and networking layer - in order to streamline EVM transaction processing. We are introducing these low-level optimizations, allowing consumer-grade hardware to deliver exceptional performance while maintaining a high degree of decentralization.
