Steven Landers

Steven Landers

AI-Native Engineering ExecutiveDistributed Systems & Security Architect

I am an engineering leader with 20 years of experience building distributed, security-sensitive systems and leading the teams behind them. I served as CTO of Forta, led teams of up to 21 engineers at Vonage, and managed the Consensus & Execution team at Sei Labs, where I now work on a stealth project. I hold an MBA and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Georgia.

20 yrsbuilding and leading engineering teams
21engineers and UX professionals on my largest team
$23Mraised from a16z by Forta, where I was CTO
~200k TPSdesign target for Sei Giga consensus

Leadership

Sei Labs · manager, Consensus & Execution team

I managed the five-engineer Consensus & Execution team delivering Sei Giga incrementally to mainnet. I am now in a stealth role on an unannounced project.

Forta · Director of Development / CTO

I led the nine-engineer team behind Forta as it grew from a laptop prototype to a ~12,000-node network backed by a $23 million a16z raise, owning architecture, roadmaps, technical design reviews, and performance management.

Vocalocity / Vonage · teams of up to 21

I led teams of up to 21 engineers and UX professionals, including other managers, and was promoted from Software Engineer through Development Manager and Director of Development to Director of Software Architecture, coordinating distributed teams in Atlanta, New Jersey, and Tel Aviv before and after the Vonage acquisition.

Engineering & business · MBA

I hold an MBA alongside a computer-science degree. At Pindrop I delivered recurring architectural briefings to engineering, sales, and executive audiences.

Technical depth

Sei Giga · designed for ~5 gigagas/sec, roughly 200,000 TPS

I led the design and prototyping of a multi-proposer blockchain architecture based on a modified Autobahn consensus protocol and co-authored the published research behind it.

First parallelized EVM

I designed and implemented Block-STM parallel transaction execution for Sei, the first parallelized EVM, with deterministic state-conflict detection and a sequential fallback to preserve correctness under pathological conflict and denial-of-service scenarios.

Spec-driven agentic development · my primary way of building

I led the transition to agentic, spec-driven development at Sei Labs. My team and I maintain high-level, machine-readable specs: message formats, disaster-recovery and high-availability characteristics, and what each component owns and does not own. Custom agent skills render the specs, generate code from them, and turn spec changes into pull requests, backed by automated validation. I keep direct ownership of architecture, security, code review, and production deployment.

Forta · laptop prototype to ~12,000 nodes

As principal architect, I helped grow a decentralized transaction-monitoring and threat-detection network to 900+ detection bots across Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism, serving 13,000+ subscribers.

Fraud detection at Pindrop · toward ~3 billion calls per year

I architected fraud-detection and authentication systems used by major banks, including real-time detection, model management, and machine-learning processing pipelines.

Career

2023–Present
Sei Labs · L7 Engineer (Manager)
Managed the five-engineer team behind multi-proposer consensus and the parallelized EVM. Currently in a stealth role on an unannounced project.
2020–2023
OpenZeppelin / Forta · Director of Development / CTO, Forta
Led nine engineers as CTO of Forta, which raised $23M from a16z; principal architect for Forta and the Defender DevSecOps platform.
2019–2020
Bishop Fox · Principal Engineer & Software Manager
Managed five engineers building a continuous attack-surface and vulnerability-detection platform for Fortune 500 customers.
2017–2019
Netvote · Co-Founder & Technical Director (side venture)
Anonymous, tamper-resistant voting platform built on Ethereum; delivered production elections.
2016–2019
Pindrop · Software Architect
Fraud-detection and authentication systems for major banks and enterprise call centers; led the team that launched Cloud Protect.
2010–2016
Vocalocity / Vonage · Director of Software Architecture
Scaled a business communications platform through acquisition; led teams of up to 21.
2006–2010
CGI Group · Consultant
Production telecommunications, billing, portal, and set-top-box systems.

Education

MBA, University of Georgia (2012)
BS in Computer Science, University of Georgia (2005)

Publications

Contact