Six of the nine openings on Mysten Labs’ live job board—two-thirds—are in security, product or legal. Mysten describes itself as remote first, and the mix points to a hiring model in which crypto experience is not a common currency: each opening asks for a different blend of technical, product, legal and commercial judgment, while a distributed team must make ownership visible without office proximity.
Candidates who match the team mix and work style advance; those who do not are likely screened out early. The practical consequence is blunt: a résumé needs to prove one named problem for one team, not display a broad inventory of crypto credentials.
Who Gets Hired and Onto Which Teams
The openings show where that filter lands:
| Function | Count | Recent openings | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security | 3 | Security Engineer; Senior Security Engineer, DeFi; Staff Security Engineer, Walrus | USA (Remote) |
| Product | 2 | Product Lead, AI; Staff Product Designer, DeFi | Both USA (Remote) |
| Legal | 1 | Associate General Counsel, Corporate | USA (Remote) |
| Partnerships and sales | 2 | Enterprise Sales Lead, AI; Senior Dealmaker - AI | Both USA (Remote) |
| Software engineering | 1 | Software Engineer, Partner Solutions (Greece) | Athens Office; listed as remote |
Security is not one search: general systems work, senior DeFi and staff-level Walrus carry different demands. Product hiring splits leadership from design, while counsel points to corporate work. An application should separate evidence by domain—DeFi versus Walrus versus general systems; AI product versus DeFi design; corporate law versus commercial AI—and turn the chosen title into a concrete decision, deliverable or result. Both commercial openings name AI, so sellers and dealmakers should tie prior results to Mysten’s AI agenda.
Remote status adds another filter. Mysten’s careers page describes a global team that connects through co-working opportunities and company-wide offsites. The page also says:
“Everyone carries a box here.”
Taken as a description of work, the phrase points to responsibility rather than location. Mysten says it asks how candidates executed, challenged themselves, motivated others, made judgments and handled failure. In a distributed team, those examples can show whether someone can take ownership and contribute beyond a narrow assignment.
The first mutual-fit screen comes before the fuller interview cycle. Concrete evidence gives that gate something to judge; an industry label does not.
The job postings and careers material say little about new-graduate or internship paths. No opening is labeled new graduate, graduate, internship, intern or entry level. Several titles omit senior wording, and counsel carries an associate title, but neither establishes a campus hiring route. Mysten’s careers material documents neither a general new-grad cohort nor an internship program. Early-career applicants should not assume a hidden funnel. Treat an unlabeled role as a regular opening: school projects, internships or comparable work can supply evidence, but they do not create a separate entry-level track.
Before applying, build a one-page role brief: name the team and product context, mirror the posting’s functional language, attach the strongest evidence for its core problem, and include one example of independent judgment and cross-team motivation. Cut claims that do not support the brief. A remote label will not, by itself, carry an application through the first screen. The compensation data offers a useful parallel: published ranges describe particular jobs, not a company-wide crypto benchmark.
What It Pays
Mysten Labs’ current job postings show a typical salary band of $147,000–$273,000 for Mysten Labs roles, with a median of $251,000 across eight salaried roles. That summary does not set a company-wide pay grade; the openings price different levels and domains. The number still prices one output, not a generic crypto worker.
Mysten Labs salary bands by role
The table separates openings that publish an annual salary band from the one that does not.
| Opening | Location label | Published annual salary |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise Sales Lead, AI | USA (Remote) | $185,000–$270,000 |
| Security Engineer | USA (Remote) | $140,000–$190,000 |
| Product Lead, AI | USA (Remote) | $185,000–$270,000 |
| Senior Security Engineer, DeFi | USA (Remote) | $165,000–$225,000 |
| Software Engineer, Partner Solutions (Greece) | Athens Office | Not published |
| Staff Product Designer, DeFi | USA (Remote) | $150,000–$225,000 |
| Associate General Counsel, Corporate | USA (Remote) | $190,000–$280,000 |
| Staff Security Engineer, Walrus | USA (Remote) | $180,000–$264,000 |
| Senior Dealmaker - AI | USA (Remote) | $161,000–$237,000 |
The aggregate band can mislead in either direction: the Security Engineer range falls below the summary band, while corporate counsel reaches above its $273,000 upper end. Zero G Talent does not explain how it calculated the median, so treat the figure as a board summary, not a midpoint every candidate should expect.
Security is priced by level and domain
The security openings form a ladder. The general Security Engineer starts at the bottom, the DeFi specialist carries a higher band, and the Staff Security Engineer working on Walrus reaches the highest security ceiling. Seniority raises the range, but the domain also changes it. For comparison, a recruiter sees three distinct propositions: distributed-systems security, protocol-focused DeFi protection and Walrus staff work. The titles do not describe interchangeable experience.
Product, sales and legal carry the top end
The Product Lead, AI and Enterprise Sales Lead, AI openings share a salary band, according to Mysten Labs, and their duties explain the overlap. The product role turns Mysten Labs’ AI and blockchain capabilities into customer-ready products, defines permissions and oversight, validates demand, and drives adoption and revenue. The sales role develops enterprise sales and go-to-market strategy for AI agent products.
Corporate counsel sets the highest ceiling in the table, as Mysten Labs’ Associate General Counsel posting shows. The Staff Product Designer, DeFi and Senior Dealmaker - AI openings occupy their own bands. Their markets and outputs are not interchangeable labels for someone at Mysten Labs.
Remote status does not flatten compensation into one category; each published role band is specific to the opening rather than set by remote status.
What the posting does not say
The board lists annual ranges but does not split them into base salary, cash bonus or equity. Do not treat the listed maximum as total compensation without confirming the package with the recruiter. Ask whether the number covers base salary alone and what sits outside the range.
A company profile reports that the US bands do not vary by location within the United States. A “USA (Remote)” label therefore should not be read as a state-specific pay adjustment. The Athens software-engineering posting omits salary, so it still cannot show parity with US bands or a European discount.
Before an interview, put the salary floor, ceiling, location label, required function and unanswered compensation question on one line for each target role, then ask the recruiter to fill the gaps. A posted maximum is a ceiling for the stated range—not total compensation or an offer. The first recruiter call is the natural place to resolve those gaps and test the match.
How the Hiring Process Works and What Gets Candidates Through It
Mysten Labs starts full-time candidates with one or two phone interviews, then moves candidates who pass that initial screen into a separate virtual interview cycle. The opening exchange tests fit for the role; the virtual format requires the company to establish it through evidence rather than office presence.
That distinction appears in what the first postings ask. Mysten’s engineering postings ask for experience with distributed systems and consensus, storage or networking protocols; prior blockchain or cryptographic protocol work is a plus rather than a requirement for the security role. A résumé can list protocol vocabulary and still leave the relevant gap.
The same rule applies across functions. The Product Lead, AI and Associate General Counsel, Corporate run separate searches and require different records. Mysten’s hiring guidance says every candidate will have a deep-dive conversation in their field, whether that is legal, operations, marketing, business development or another discipline. A role-specific record gives the screen a concrete basis; a document aimed at the wrong team buries its useful parts.
Posted experience requirements narrow the pool before deeper evaluation. A company profile summarizes the live-role requirements as follows:
| Role level | Stated experience requirement |
|---|---|
| Every live role reviewed | At least 5 years |
| Senior engineering | 5+ years of systems or network programming |
| Staff and manager | 8+ years at an E6-equivalent level |
| Partnerships | 8–10 years |
These floors are application filters, not interview trivia. A candidate can have strong protocol experience and still miss a posting when the required level or years are absent.
Candidates apply through the Ashby board linked from the role. Mysten’s published hiring guidance says the number and format of interviews depend on the candidate’s skillset and the role. The first phone conversation covers background, experience and interest in Mysten Labs; mutual fit determines whether the fuller sequence follows. Check that recruiter emails come from the @mystenlabs.com domain and that the role appears on the careers page.
Here is how the published process usually runs:
| Part of the process | Published format | What it examines |
|---|---|---|
| Initial screen | One or two 45-minute phone interviews | Background, experience, interest and mutual fit |
| Role interview cycle | Most full-time candidates then complete four separate 45-minute virtual interviews | Breadth and depth, tailored to the discipline |
| Technical and behavioral questions | Format depends on the role | Systems design, execution, judgment, motivation and failure |
| Live coding for relevant technical roles | A live coding round; no take-home is announced | How the solution was reached, code structure and style, and implementation |
| After the interviews | A recruiter typically responds within 1 week | Follow-up; the source does not promise an offer decision |
Each requisition can depart from this format. The company’s material does not say whether a live coding round counts as one of the interviews or runs as a separate meeting.
The cycle changes by discipline: technical candidates encounter systems design and live coding, while legal, product and commercial candidates receive a deep dive in their field. For engineers, live coding provides the clearest evidence. Mysten evaluates both how the candidate solves the problem and the structure and style of the code. It looks for efficient, readable, maintainable code that turns an algorithmic idea into working implementation. A résumé can show protocol vocabulary; a live interview tests whether the candidate can think, implement and explain under scrutiny. Broader crypto experience does not replace that role-specific evidence.
The interview also tests product context. Mysten tells candidates to read its blog, the Sui whitepaper, the Sui website and a Web Summit 2022 talk by Evan Cheng. Candidates who connect protocol decisions to what the company is building arrive ready for common questions about Mysten’s work. The company then returns to role-specific depth, so preparation supplies context rather than replacing evidence.
Postings also screen for work style. Current ones say crypto priorities change, the work done last month may differ from the work under way today, and the company does not seek a 9-to-5 job. They also require direct communication. In a distributed team, these are not minor office preferences. No source publishes a formal rejection rule for schedule or location, so treat the points as evidence of fit rather than a claimed knockout policy. A candidate who describes only fixed-scope work has not answered the concern the posting raises.
The company also asks what motivates a candidate. Its guidance says:
“We want to know what motivates the people we meet. There’s no wrong answer here; we just want to see you get fired up about something you love.”
A generic mission statement can fit any interview; a concrete account of work a candidate pursued, enjoyed and learned from gives the interviewer something real to assess. In a remote team, that evidence of self-direction matters because managers cannot infer it from hallway visibility.
The recruiter’s response window is not a promise of an offer. Mysten publishes no interview-to-offer rate, acceptance rate or rejection rubric. A company profile reports that Mysten Labs may use AI-assisted tools to identify and evaluate candidates, with humans making the final decision, and that employment is contingent on a background check covering employment history, education and criminal history.
The company defines that hiring sequence more clearly than it defines daily work.
Where the Work Happens
The location labels make the distributed model plain: all but one opening carries a “USA (Remote)” label, the Athens software-engineering role is the exception and is also marked remote, and none says hybrid. The pattern aligns with Mysten’s explicit “Remote First” description. A current company profile identifies Palo Alto as the headquarters, although the role labels do not specify office-attendance requirements.
The labels reach beyond protocol engineering into product, legal and commercial work. Responsibility, rather than office geography, defines the job.
The Software Engineer, Partner Solutions (Greece) names the Athens Office. It is the only concrete office assignment in the current opening set; broader claims about additional hubs or a hub-and-spoke structure would require separate evidence. A Built In summary describes the role as building full-stack decentralized applications for blockchain developers and business partners, creating proof-of-concept solutions on Sui, building web interfaces, researching blockchain and industry applications, contributing to open-source projects, and collaborating with international partners. The posting still does not state office attendance frequency, residence requirements or work authorization.
NFT Evening said in a March 2025 profile that Sui, a layer-1 blockchain, uses a directed acyclic graph architecture and Mysticeti consensus, with theoretical capacity for up to 300,000 transactions per second and transaction fees of about a penny. In an interview, Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun said gaming was the company’s biggest focus, followed by finance and commerce. That dated account supplies company and product context, but it is not current hiring guidance.
Those systems make protocol safety, user adoption and commercial constraints simultaneous concerns. For a globally distributed team, evidence that a candidate can own the work without relying on office proximity is a practical part of the case.
Most postings do not specify expected time-zone overlap, home-office support, equipment, meeting cadence or a process for resolving urgent issues. The partnerships posting states that travel of 20% or more is expected, often internationally. “Remote” alone does not tell a candidate whether the job expects daily overlap with US hours or occasional attendance elsewhere. Get those terms in the recruiter screen rather than assume a preferred setup.
The Athens file is thinner still. No source describes its amenities, meeting facilities, hardware access or security arrangements. The data locates a role; it does not establish what the building supports. Security and product candidates should ask which tools the company provides and how it handles work involving sensitive systems.
Location and company-wide connection practices are documented; finer operating details are not. That is where the company’s history offers a sharper clue about the standard applicants must meet.
Who Thrives Here
The job postings describe the tasks; the company’s history and its co-founder’s public account describe the standard behind them. Adeniyi Abiodun is the most sustained voice in that record, linking protocol engineering, product judgment and the company’s commercial priorities.
Technical depth without theater
A history of Sui identifies five former Meta engineers who had built the Diem blockchain and Move programming language in Meta’s Novi division before founding Mysten Labs in 2021. In a 2023 CryptoNews interview, Adeniyi Abiodun described the team’s range across languages, compilers, cryptography, consensus, product and marketing. That breadth is the background the founders brought from Diem to Mysten Labs and Sui.
The recent Security Engineer posting is U.S.-remote, while Mysten’s security and engineering postings ask for protocol-level evidence involving distributed systems, consensus, storage, networking or cryptographic security. The first page should map what the candidate protected, changed and learned.
Sui’s object-centric design makes ownership and transaction dependencies core protocol questions. Transactions that touch different objects can run in parallel. Abiodun dismissed transactions per second as “a stupid metric” and asked:
“What matters is if I demand more bandwidth or I demand more capacity, can you provide that, right? And still maintain the system integrity at scale?”
That standard asks applicants to reason from dependency to safety to scale, not list protocol names. It applies differently across the openings: token launches do not show safe protocol reasoning, and technical diagrams do not show that users can adopt a product.
Product judgment and commercial focus
Product judgment is just as specific. In the same CryptoNews interview, Abiodun said:
“My strong point is turning hard science or hard technical marvels into product. Like I care about consumers. I really want things that consumers can use and I can realize things that are very technical in nature and how to boil it down to something the average person can use day in, day out.”
The Product Lead, AI and Staff Product Designer, DeFi approach product judgment from different directions. One carries product leadership; the other demands design judgment in decentralized finance. Protocol expertise alone will not connect the two.
In that interview, Abiodun said 60 studios had signed to launch games on the network. He described gaming as the company’s leading priority, with finance and commerce next. A candidate who fits should show how they connect architectural choices to user behavior and business constraints. For a product opening, that means simplifying something difficult without erasing the safeguards that make it trustworthy.
Remote work makes ownership visible
The available public documentation details protocol choices much more than everyday employee experience. It does not specify meeting cadence, asynchronous hours, on-call expectations, promotion rules or daily management style.
The Associate General Counsel, Corporate and Enterprise Sales Lead, AI are both remote, confirming that the distributed model extends beyond code. For applicants, the mix makes visible decision-making a practical concern: show how you own progress without office proximity. Remote work does not mean quiet work; it removes the chance that a reviewer or teammate infers a contribution from a nearby desk.
For an applicant, the relevant evidence is behavioral: state what is done, what is blocked and who owns the next decision; disagree without turning the exchange into a search for allies; and explain a technical trade-off to a colleague without flattening it. This fits Mysten’s stated “Everybody carries the box” value, although the public sources do not present visible ownership as a formal policy.
Resilience without corporate mythology
The founding history poses a harder test: can someone keep working when the project resets? Abiodun said of Diem’s end:
“In reality, we never got to launch it. We never got to see the light of day.”
The team then founded Mysten Labs and launched Sui’s mainnet on May 3, 2023.
Resilience should not be romanticized. The available sources do not show how the company handles routine reversals, only that its founders experienced a major one. They do, however, provide applicants with a concrete test: describe a redirected project and explain what changed, what you controlled and what improved after the reset. A list of launches says little. A project that lost its original shape and still produced a defined result says more about how someone operates under a new plan.
For the remote reviewer, the résumé is the box to open: one named problem, one visible result and evidence that its owner can carry the next decision from wherever they sit.
Working in frontier tech? Zero G Talent tracks the openings: see every open Mysten Labs role, browse frontier tech jobs, the companies hiring, and the people building the field.