Steven Landers

Principal Engineer · distributed systems, financial-market infrastructure, security

I'm a principal-level engineer with 20 years of experience building distributed, security-sensitive systems: consensus protocols, parallel execution engines, fraud detection, and regulated financial infrastructure. At Sei Labs I lead consensus and execution work; before that I helped grow Forta from a laptop prototype into a 12,000-node decentralized security network.

Highlights

Technical

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 I lead the five-engineer team delivering it incrementally to mainnet.

First parallelized EVM in the Sei ecosystem

I designed and implemented Block-STM parallel transaction execution on Sei's Cosmos-based EVM, with deterministic state-conflict detection and a sequential fallback to preserve correctness under pathological conflict and denial-of-service scenarios.

Forta · laptop prototype to ~12,000 nodes, $23M a16z raise

As principal architect and technical leader, 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.

Leadership

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, technical design reviews, roadmaps, one-on-ones, and performance reviews.

Vocalocity / Vonage · teams of up to 21

I 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.

Sei Labs · manager, Consensus & Execution team

I manage the five-engineer Consensus & Execution team delivering Sei Giga incrementally to mainnet, combining organization-wide architectural leadership with hands-on implementation.

Engineering & business · MBA

An MBA on top of a computer-science foundation. I'm at home where technical strategy meets regulatory, operational, and business constraints.

Career

2023–Present
Sei Labs · L7 Engineer (Manager), Consensus & Execution
Multi-proposer consensus and parallelized EVM.
2020–2023
OpenZeppelin / Forta · Director of Development / CTO, Forta
Principal architect for the Forta network and the Defender DevSecOps platform.
2019–2020
Bishop Fox · Principal Engineer & Software Manager
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.
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