Matter Labs Case Study - 11 Hires in 6 Months

How TechChain Talent built a parallel hiring engine for Matter Labs (zkSync), closing 11 roles across 5 jurisdictions in six months with 100% retention.

Back to Insights

Matter Labs x TechChain Talent

Eleven hires. Five countries. Six months. How we built a parallel hiring engine for the team behind zkSync, and closed a role that had sat open for two years in eight weeks.

Download PDF

01 / The Brief

Eleven roles. Five jurisdictions. One of crypto's hardest hiring briefs.

Matter Labs builds zero knowledge proof infrastructure. The technical bar for their hiring is as high as it gets in the industry. The challenge was not volume. It was breadth.

Eleven roles, running simultaneously across protocol engineering, security, DevOps, partner engineering, legal, finance, and marketing. Five jurisdictions, each needing the right employment structure in place from day one.

Two of those roles particularly stand out: a

Protocol Security Lead

that required some of the deepest niche sourcing we have done, and a

Head of Product Marketing

that had been open for two years.

02 / The Approach

No queue. No waiting. Every role live at once.

Three recruiters worked in parallel from week one. Every role live at once, each with a dedicated owner from first outreach to signed offer. No sequential queue, no waiting for one placement to close before the next opened.

Sourcing was not channel driven. It was community driven: ZK research forums, protocol working groups, the private referral networks where these people actually live. Daily contact with hiring managers, fast iteration, calibration tightening with every shortlist.

Cross border placement is where most agencies quietly hand the problem back to the client. We did not. Deel, Toku, and direct contractor arrangements, chosen per jurisdiction, managed end to end, so Matter Labs' people function never had to carry the complexity.

03 / Spotlight - Protocol Security Lead

There is no shortcut. And no inbound funnel.

Smart contract security at protocol scale is one of the hardest hires in crypto. The talent pool is tiny, mostly not actively looking, and almost entirely outside any job board ecosystem you can buy access to. Conventional sourcing does not touch it.

So we built the map ourselves. We worked through every major third party smart contract auditing firm and identified the senior auditors worth approaching. We trawled public GitHub for contributors to the protocols, libraries, and tooling that matter. We pulled leaderboards from the major bug bounty programs and ranked the top earners by chain, by category, by recency of activity.

Then we did the slow work: warm outreach, multiple touchpoints, real conversations about what Matter Labs was actually building. The right person came out of the long tail, not the obvious shortlist.

"When founders ask us whether we can find someone who can actually break and defend an L1, this is what the answer looks like operationally. You have to look under every rock."

04 / Spotlight - Head of Product Marketing

A two year search. Eight weeks to close.

"First strong interview I have conducted in a long time."

Anthony Rose, Former Chief Product Officer, Matter Labs

Two years is a long time for a role to sit open. It creates pressure, breeds compromise, and slowly it erodes a team's belief that the right person exists at all. When a search has run that long, the sourcing problem is almost never the real problem. The real problem is calibration. The brief has drifted, the bar has shifted, and the JD no longer maps to what the team actually needs.

Half our job on this one was working back to a sharp, honest brief. The other half was finding the person who fit it.

We did. A senior marketing leader with deep experience across both institutional finance and crypto, based in the UK. The search that had run for two years closed in eight weeks.

05 / Results

Eleven placements. Eleven still in seat.

Engineering · Security · Protocol · DevOps

Infrastructure Security Engineer

Protocol Engineer

Full Stack Engineer

DevOps Engineer

Partner Engineer

3 Operations

Marketing · Legal · Finance

Legal Counsel

FP&A Manager

06 / Reflections

Two things, over and over.

i. Proximity is the difference between sixty days and two years.

The best recruiting partnerships work because of proximity. The closer we sit to the founding team, the faster we calibrate, the sharper the targeting gets, and the better the candidates we surface. Proximity is not a nice to have. It is the difference between a search that closes in 60 days and one that runs for two years.

ii. This talent market rewards specialists, not job boards.

The engineers, security researchers, and counsel who operate at the frontier of onchain infrastructure are not on job boards. They are in private channels, working groups, and referral networks. You find them through depth, not reach.

If you are hiring, let's talk.

Bawar and Julian, our cofounders, take these conversations directly.

Matter Labs Case Study - 11 hires across 5 countries in 6 months

How TechChain Talent built a parallel hiring engine for Matter Labs (zkSync), closing 11 roles across 5 jurisdictions in six months with 100% retention.

Matter Labs x TechChain Talent Case Study

TechChain Talent

noopener noreferrer

Matter Labs case study cover

Longest Open Role

United Kingdom

United States

When founders ask us whether we can find someone who can actually break and defend an L1, this is what the answer looks like operationally. You have to look under every rock.

First strong interview I have conducted in a long time.

setMenuOpen(false); return (

Building the decentralized future, one placement at a time.

For Candidates

For Employers

Our Services

M19.59 6.69a4.83 4.83 0 0 1-3.77-4.25V2h-3.45v13.67a2.89 2.89 0 0 1-2.88 2.5 2.89 2.89 0 0 1-2.89-2.89 2.89 2.89 0 0 1 2.89-2.89c.28 0 .54.04.79.1v-3.5a6.37 6.37 0 0 0-.79-.05A6.34 6.34 0 0 0 3.15 15a6.34 6.34 0 0 0 6.34 6.34 6.34 6.34 0 0 0 6.34-6.34V8.71a8.19 8.19 0 0 0 4.76 1.52v-3.4a4.85 4.85 0 0 1-1-.14z

Live crypto roles

View all open crypto roles

Hire blockchain engineers

Vetted crypto engineering talent across every major ecosystem.

Retained executive search

Dedicated search for senior and leadership crypto hires.

Browse open crypto roles

Live roles from teams hiring right now.

More insights

Newsletters, reports and case studies on crypto hiring.