Stevan Lohja

Founded it and grew it into the network's front door - the place developers, ambassadors and node operators actually go first.

• Founded the Discord community that now has roughly 50,000 members, and built the support and moderation structure underneath it.
• Run the validator community calls, the recurring forum where operators raise problems while they are still questions rather than incidents.
• Advised the ambassador cohort on building on the network, so advocacy came with working code rather than only enthusiasm.

• Community strategy
• Discord
• Advocacy
• Operator relations

A GitHub-based community bounty program I created, so community interest turns into merged work instead of staying interest.

• More than 50 bounties published across documentation, tooling and integrations.
• Public repository, so the contribution history is visible and reviewable by anyone - including a hiring manager.

• GitHub
• Program design
• Incentive design

Owned the path a developer takes from first contact to a working application, from closed alpha through the public milestones.

• Onboarded a private alpha cohort of roughly 700 developers onto Devnet-0, managing their API access programmatically rather than by hand.
• Drove 100+ feedback issues into product and engineering; many shipped as feature enhancements.
• Restructured onboarding around a new Getting Started path built from real developer feedback rather than internal assumptions about what was confusing.

• Developer onboarding
• API programs
• Feedback loops
• DX research

I started my career as the only developer-facing function at a protocol with no marketing team - docs, demos, articles and community, alone. I never stopped owning documentation.

• Delivered documentation from closed alpha through the public devnet and testnet milestones.
• Own the operator-facing library: runbooks, operator guides and the compatibility matrix the fleet versions against - code owner for the guides and the matrix.
• Write the change and incident records operators navigate by during a coordinated upgrade, which is documentation with a deadline attached.

• Technical writing
• Docs-as-code
• Runbooks
• Markdown

Representing a protocol in public, and converting attention into contribution rather than into a follower count.

• Represented Midnight at 15+ industry conferences including Consensus and Blockchain Rio, with event activations designed to turn attendees into active contributors.
• Judged and mentored hackathons in Argentina.
• Ran the Ethereum Classic hackathon program owning judging and budget, mentored 12 accelerator startups, and spoke across the US, Canada and Asia.

• Public speaking
• Hackathons
• Event strategy
• Mentoring

Getting a network change in front of every party who has to act on it, and running the standards process that decides what changes in the first place.

• Midnight Improvement Proposal (MIP) Editor and a member of the Technical Authority; formerly ECIP Editor for Ethereum Classic and hard-fork coordinator across 200+ ecosystem stakeholders.
• Launched ETC Signal, the ecosystem newsletter carrying network changes to 200+ exchange, wallet, validator and security-operations stakeholders at a ~51% open rate.
• 100+ operator communications at Midnight, plus the operator onboarding material every new counterparty starts from.

• Standards process
• Ecosystem comms
• Newsletters
• Governance

An OpenTofu/Terraform module for a GCP validator that adds what the existing shared module lacks entirely: a trusted WireGuard overlay configured on the host, not just a firewall rule.

• The private key never enters instance metadata. cloud-init ships a config template without it; a boot script fetches the key from Secret Manager at first start.
• Re-runs use wg syncconf, not wg-quick down/up - so a config change cannot partition a live validator mid-apply.
• No autoscaler, deliberately. Scaling out a keyed validator produces a duplicate block producer. Metrics firewall is closed to health-check probe ranges instead of the internet.
• Placed as a CI-visible subdirectory consumed by nothing, so iteration produced five no-op plans and zero risk to mainnet. Gated on a two-VM Multipass mesh test before any cloud work.

• OpenTofu
• GCP
• WireGuard
• cloud-init
• systemd
• Secret Manager
• Bash

A design for weekly, cryptographically signed, publicly verifiable chain snapshots. It exists because syncing a node from genesis was measured at ~0.2 blocks/sec against a chain advancing at 10 blocks/min - an unaided bootstrap that effectively never converges.

• Allowlist, never exclude-list, when packaging. The node's base path also holds its keystore and network secret. An allowlist fails closed; an exclude-list fails open and publishes a node key.
• Both database trees or nothing. The chain store and the ledger store are siblings and must be captured at one instant; a partial artifact is silently broken.
• A signature proves publication, not correctness. The signature proves who published the bytes; a published chain attestation - height, block hash, state root, cross-checkable against the live chain - is what makes forged state detectable even under key compromise.
• Publish order is upload, sign, verify from a clean host, human approval, then flip latest. Never the reverse.

• cosign
• Cloud KMS / HSM
• GCS + CDN
• ParityDB
• Threat modelling

Node operators are told to provision 500 GB NVMe and 32 GB RAM, and the guide names Cardano sync as the long pole. That pole is cardano-db-sync plus PostgreSQL. Could a lighter Cardano data node (Dolos, documented under 2 GB RAM) take its place?

• Answer: not by configuration today - and here is precisely the seam. Ruled out three integration paths by reading source, with citations, before launching a single VM.
• The node reads db-sync over raw SQL, so there is no RPC layer to intercept; and the candidate has no PostgreSQL surface at all, which rules out a wire-protocol shim.
• Upstream already ships a data source for it - but unreleased and stalled, absent from the latest tag, with a divergence found in a consensus-critical query. The vendored fork predates all of it and returns "not implemented yet". That match arm is the seam.
• Stated the honest ceiling on my own result: a second db-sync-bound component sits outside the upstream toolkit, so a green result must not be reported as "the dependency can be dropped".

• Rust (source analysis)
• PostgreSQL
• Docker Compose
• Multipass
• Ouroboros / CBOR

The platform-level plan for a multi-environment validator estate on GCP and how it is deployed and governed through infrastructure as code - project topology, secret model, boot nodes, snapshots, data-source topology, ephemeral environments and agentic operations, as ten workstreams with stable identifiers.

• Killed a proposed design by verifying it. The node has zero KMS integration - keys are plaintext files - so a KMS-as-signer model was unreachable. Redirected KMS to artifact signing, where the signer is KMS-aware, and met the actual goal (security owns keys, operators cannot read them) with a separate project using Secret Manager and customer-managed encryption keys.
• Merging is deploying, and a change to the shared module fans out to every environment including mainnet - so node changes stay leaf-only. Documented as a blast-radius rule.
• Agent-readiness starts with a docs-truth pass. Roughly a dozen claims in the repository's own documentation contradicted its code. A human skims past that; an agent asserts it.
• Authority ceiling for any agent in the plan: propose a change, never merge. Automated remediation is explicitly out of scope.

• OpenTofu
• GCP
• Secret Manager
• Cloud KMS / CMEK
• Architecture review

Ten operational workstreams - operator communications, leadership reporting, SLA review, off-hours incident handover, roadmap, platform planning and more - run as AI-assisted workflows rather than ad-hoc prompting.

• Each workstream has a written protocol, a confidentiality tier and an approval gate. Nothing publishes, sends or posts without explicit human approval.
• Facts are verified against read-only clones of the source-of-truth repositories rather than paraphrased from memory - the rule that catches stale versions and invented flags.
• Includes a monthly classification of my own function on an agentic-versus-AI-resistant grid, to decide what to automate and where human effort is genuinely irreplaceable.

• Claude Code
• Agentic workflow design
• Ollama
• Human-review gates
• Markdown protocols

Rather than searching aggregators, enumerate the employers worth working for and poll their applicant-tracking systems directly. Python standard library only - no dependencies, no API keys, no paid calls anywhere in the loop.

• Normalises three different ATS payload shapes into one schema, tracks seen postings, then scores against a weighted profile behind a hard location gate. ~1,100 postings down to ~15.
• Two scoring defects found and fixed on the first run, both instructive: description-based domain scoring inflates every posting at a crypto company, so domain words now score at full weight in the title and one third in the body; and a loose location term matched the prose "allows us to", passing a posting from the wrong continent.
• Tuned to over-include rather than miss, with the threshold exposed as configuration and the limitations written down rather than glossed.

• Python 3 (stdlib)
• Greenhouse / Lever / Ashby APIs
• JSON
• Deterministic scoring

A GitHub-based community bounty program I created, turning a Discord community into people who ship. More than 50 bounties published.

• Founded the Midnight Discord community, now roughly 50,000 members, and advised the ambassador cohort on building on the network.
• Represented Midnight at 15+ conferences including Consensus and Blockchain Rio; judged and mentored hackathons in Argentina, with activations designed to convert attendees into active contributors.

• GitHub
• Community programs
• Developer advocacy

I started my career as a technical writer and never stopped owning the docs. Restructured developer onboarding around a new Getting Started path built from real developer feedback.

• Onboarded a private alpha cohort of roughly 700 developers, managing API access programmatically and driving 100+ feedback issues into product and engineering - many of which shipped as features.
• Owned documentation delivery from closed alpha through public devnet and testnet milestones.
• Launched ETC Signal, an ecosystem newsletter carrying network changes to 200+ exchange, wallet, validator and security-operations stakeholders at a ~51% open rate.

• Technical writing
• Docs-as-code
• Developer onboarding
• API programs