About Sapio

Sapio is building a prediction-market-like DeFi protocol for decentralized fund management.

The Role

We are looking for a hands-on Lead Developer to help take Sapio from testing to production launch.

This is primarily a coding role: you should expect to spend most of your time building, testing, debugging, reviewing, deploying, and improving production code.

You should be able to work across smart contracts, decentralized web/domain setup, indexers, bots/keepers/solvers, frontend state, testing, security and audit readiness, monitoring, deployment, and launch operations.

You will work closely with the co-founders, who remain involved in protocol design, product direction, and technical architecture, while you take day-to-day responsibility for implementation and production readiness.

Sapio is a mechanism-driven protocol, so the role also requires strong analytical thinking around incentives, accounting, game theory, adversarial behavior, and protocol economics.

Because Sapio controls an on-chain reserve of economically valuable assets, security is central to this role. You will own audit readiness, work directly with external security auditors, and take responsibility for key management, upgrade safety, and incident response as we move toward mainnet.

This is a Stockholm-based hybrid role. We expect you to work from our Stockholm office at least one day per week.

The Protocol

Sapio uses a two-token model: a DAO/governance token for staking, incentives, governance, and protocol participation, and a basket/fund token backed by a reserve of underlying assets.

Participants stake on which tokens they believe will improve the basket. The protocol attempts to execute those reserve changes, and rewards are distributed based on realized performance.

Application Challenge

In your application, please include two things:

Your Ideal Build Stack

In maximum one page, describe how you would build the first production version of Sapio.

Cover decentralized web access, smart contracts, off-chain infrastructure, frontend, testing, AI-assisted development, and launch operations.

We are especially interested in what you would enforce on-chain, what can safely live off-chain, how the system remains usable if the original team disappears, and how you would test the protocol’s incentive mechanics against exploits in settlement, rewards, claims, and governance.

Example Code From Previous Work

Include links to code you have written or contributed to.

For each example, briefly explain what you built, what you personally owned, what was difficult, and what you would improve if you built it again.

What We Are Looking For

We are not looking for the fanciest stack, the longest answer, or someone who mainly wants to do high-level architecture. We are looking for someone who can ship.

You should be able to reason clearly, make good decentralization tradeoffs, understand smart contract accounting and security, think through incentive and game-theoretic failure modes, use AI coding tools effectively without blindly trusting them, and show real evidence of technical delivery.

What Makes You Stand Out

These are not required, but they are the kind of edge we are looking for:

Product instinct: experience shipping user-facing trading or DeFi products, with a feel for engagement loops and game mechanics.

AI agents and trading bots: experience building autonomous agents or bots for trading, benchmarking, testing, or protocol evaluation.

Integration breadth: experience connecting protocols to external venues, data sources, and messaging layers.

Where This Can Go

As Sapio matures, we see the product surface extending into AI trading-agent showcases, hackathon-style competitions, and public leaderboards. If building that kind of competitive, agent-driven product excites you, this is a place to do it.