Offchain Labs Inc. does not hire quietly. When a company built to push computation off chain decides to pull talent on chain across engineering, product, finance, people, and legal, it is a tell. On January 9, 2026, the New York based builder behind Arbitrum went public with a multi department hiring announcement, and it read less like a careers post and more like a systems check for where Ethereum infrastructure is actually heading.
This is a Princeton born operation, incorporated August 24, 2018, founded by Steven Goldfeder, Edward William Felten, and Harry Kalodner. Three researchers who stared at Ethereum’s scaling ceiling and decided the bottleneck was not philosophical, it was mathematical. Arbitrum was the output. Optimistic rollups, Nitro, Stylus, Orbit chains. Tools designed to move fast without pretending gravity does not exist.
By January 2026, that thesis is no longer theoretical. Arbitrum now secures more than $20 billion in value, commands roughly half of the Layer 2 market by total value locked, supports over 1,000 projects and more than 9,000 active developers, and processes billions of lifetime transactions. BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, WisdomTree, PayPal, and Robinhood are not experimenting here. They are deploying.
Hiring across legal and finance at this moment is the quiet headline. Institutions do not care how elegant your rollup is if your contracts, controls, and compliance cannot survive daylight. That is why Sean Soper, Head of Finance and Operations, matters in this story. Revenue is real now. Roughly $26 million annualized in gross profit, 90 percent margins, multiple income streams from fees, Timeboost auctions, and Orbit economics. This is infrastructure learning how to speak balance sheet.
Engineering and product scale for a different reason. One hundred plus Orbit chains live or in development is not a victory lap, it is a support burden. BoLD permissionless validation, Stylus multi language contracts, and sequencer decentralization are not features you ship once. They are promises you maintain. Harry Kalodner and Edward William Felten know this. You do not protect a lead by standing still.
There is wordplay baked into the name Offchain Labs for a reason. The work happens where users do not have to think about it. The risk is invisible. The reliability is assumed. That is the job. When a company hiring across people and legal at this scale tells you they are building for the long haul, believe them. This is not growth for optics. This is load bearing expansion.
