What Is a Blockchain Security Engineer?

Security engineers at crypto companies protect systems that hold value and are attacked constantly: key management and custody, infrastructure and application security, incident response, and — at protocol teams — the security of the on-chain code itself, overlapping with auditing. It is one of the industry's most consequential roles because failures are public and irreversible.

Live demand right now

ChainJobs currently lists 79 live roles whose title matches this role, 3 of them posted in the last seven days, and 38 (48%) remote. By function they fall mostly into Engineering 74 · Operations 3 · Executive 2. Every count comes from the employer's own careers page, re-verified daily.

What it pays

Among the 19 live matching roles with an employer-published USD annual band, the median midpoint is $220k, and the middle half of bands runs $190k–$275k. The top of the current market, from the employers' own listings:

• Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), US at OKX — $250k–376k
• Security Engineer, Product at Ramp Network — $258k–355k
• CISO at Rain — $250k–325k

Who is hiring for it

What the role is actually called

The most common titles on live listings that match this role: Security Engineer 5 · Senior Staff Security Engineer, AI Security 3 · Principal Security Engineer 3 · Information Security Engineer 3 · Senior Staff Security Engineer, Ripple Treasury 3 · Senior Application Security Engineer 3. Titles vary by company; the job titles reference ranks every common title on the board.

Skills and the path in

Traditional security engineering transfers strongly; the crypto layer adds key-management practice, smart-contract security and on-chain incident response. Exchanges, custodians and wallets hire the most; protocol security teams want auditing depth. Published research and CTF or contest results are a visible portfolio.

Open roles

• Security Analyst II, Trust at Chainalysis — $84k–160k
• Senior Product Security Engineer at Chainalysis — $130k–247k
• Engineering Director, Application Security at Trail of Bits — $250k–300k
• Staff Security Engineer, Threat Detection & Response at Gemini — $168k–240k
• Staff Security Engineer, Walrus at Mysten Labs — $180k–264k
• Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), US at OKX — $250k–376k

Full live set: the related jobs page, or the board with the search term above. For candidates, the how to get a crypto job guide covers the process; for employers, the hiring guides cover what this market costs and how to write the listing.

Role matching is by job title (word-boundary patterns), so counts are indicative of the role, not exhaustive. Figures computed from ChainJobs' live board on 2026-09-16; salary only from employer-published bands. How we source data →