Blockchain Job Tier List

All industries have a tier list or implied ranking. It’s usually unspoken, but it’s a real thing that should inform your strategy for getting a job as a blockchain or smart contract engineer.

At RareSkills, we get a lot of questions about how to get a blockchain job. But this question assumes that all web3 engineering jobs are created equal. They aren’t.

Some engineers are surprised when we respond “you can already get a job in blockchain,” but this is followed up with the qualifier, “it’s probably not the one you want.”

Clarification 1: Working at a web3 company doesn’t mean you do blockchain engineering.

In this tier list, we are talking specifically about engineering jobs that apply to blockchain specifically. Particularly, we will talk about smart contract development, smart contract auditing, and blockchain protocol development.

You can get a (good!) job in blockchain while knowing relatively little about smart contracts and consensus algorithms by working on tooling, front-end web applications, data science, and backend infrastructure.

However, what most engineer’s have in mind when they say “get a job in web3” they mean working on the “unique stuff,” specifically the blockchain itself, the smart contracts, and…