Senior Rust Engineer

Come join Irreducible as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with reliable and cost-efficient proof generation. We’re a high-performance cryptography startup (with an exciting hardware twist) looking for a talented Senior Software Optimization Engineer. A more technical description of what we do is below

About the role:

As a Senior, Staff or Principal Rust Engineer, you’ll work closely with other engineers across the stack to productize Binius, our binary field proof system. Your days might include orchestrating distributed proving tasks over an FPGA server cluster, working with cryptography engineers on library APIs, integrating our stack with peer-to-peer blockchain networks, and performance profiling of open source code bases.

Being a self-starter is essential, as there are always a variety of challenges that need to be tackled. Your work will have a direct impact on our growth and success. At the Staff and Principal level there will also be opportunity to mentor and guide engineers across the team, providing leadership in Rust development practices, code reviews, and architecture. 

Necessary Qualifications

• Significant professional Rust experience

• Experience with performance tuning or optimization

• Experience implementing high-performance software or distributed systems

• Understanding of computer architecture and configuration

• Ability to think across layers of abstractions

• Understanding of technology tradeoffs and a pragmatic approach to problem solving

• Mentor and guide engineers across the team, providing leadership in Rust development practices, code reviews, and architecture.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience modifying and contributing to open-source codebases

• Understanding of computer security principles

• Knowledge of AWS and/or Google Cloud

• Deep understanding of fundamental blockchain concepts

• Understanding of microservices architecture

• Familiarity with zero-knowledge cryptography

Location. We are a globally distributed company and operate across multiple time zones between US Eastern time and Eastern European Time. For this role, GMT+2 (Berlin time) is preferred, but not required.

About us:

We're building out a high-performance, cost-efficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs. Verifiable computing with zk-SNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that today's blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zk-SNARKs to prove smart contract executions, such as Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync, are already in production. We believe there is a big market opportunity to generate proofs for these networks at scale in a cost-effective way [1]. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput. 

We take the approach of co-designing hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation end-to-end. Our first-generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case [2].

We also conduct cryptography research to identify computationally efficient algorithms for verifiable computing. These research efforts produced a novel cryptographic construction based on towers of binary fields called Binius [3] [4], which we are currently developing into a production-grade system.

Our team has cross-domain expertise and includes hardware designers, low-level systems software engineers, cryptography engineers, and data center specialists, several of whom worked in HFT previously.

[1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware

[2] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fpga-architecture-for-goldilocks-ntt

[3] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/binius-hardware-optimized-snark

[4] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-binius-improve-zero-knowledge-proofs

[5] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/introducing-ulvetanna

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where talented individuals can thrive and grow. We value the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that each person brings to our team. Even if you don't fit 100% of the job's necessary qualifications, we'd still love to hear from you.

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