Software Engineer (Noir Tooling)

About Aztec

At Aztec, our goal is to add privacy to Ethereum.

In the current public blockchain paradigm, users and entities unknowingly broadcast data in the public, compromising privacy and security to get trustlessness.

Not only are unencrypted blockchains inherently privacy-exposing, they require significant redundancy to compute and verify the legitimacy of transactions.

Implementing scalable encryption in a public blockchain paradigm requires cutting-edge math and engineering. Thankfully, our team of scientists and engineers invented Plonk, the industry-standard zkSNARK, and Noir, the universal language of zero knowledge.

Now, we’re building a first of its kind Layer 2 with private smart contracts. This requires new cryptographic primitives, a zero-knowledge DSL for writing contracts, a privacy-friendly execution environment, a carefully designed set of circuits that prove the validity of the chain to L1, a decentralized block-building and proving mechanism, and a top-tier user and developer experience. And it’s now time to bring it to market.

We’ve raised $125 million from industry-leading investors including a16z crypto, Paradigm, Variant, Consensys, and a_capital, and we’re growing quickly.

The Role:

• You have strong empathy and understanding of where pain points are during the development process
• You have a strong desire to do things much better in comparison to other technologies and programming languages
• You strongly understand typical developer workflow and have an idea of how Noir Language fits into it
• You will develop solutions to help others get their job done in the most optimized way
• You will work on libraries that will be used by other developers
• You will work on Command Line Interface (CLI) applications 
• You will develop User Interfaces for Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)
• You will work on Delivery Processes (CI) to deliver software in an optimized and secure way
• You have strong Security hygiene when it comes to software delivery

Noir is an integral part of the Aztec vision as it is the language that will power the ecosystem.

Responsibilities: 

• First 90 days: work with the tooling and language team to deliver a stable version of the Noir language and tooling around it. Work with the Aztec Contracts team to optimize their development experience.
• First year: Develop more advanced tools for Noir Language and Aztec Network. Develop testing frameworks so it’s easy to integrate Noir with other frameworks, Develop Language Servers and plugins to optimize Noir Developer experience in an IDE, Develop tools to help Debug Noir programs (eg. step debugger), Develop “reverse engineering” tools to help with program optimisation.

Qualifications: 

• 2+ years of experience writing programs in Rust
• 2+ years of experience writing programs in JavaScript and derivatives (eg. TypeScript)
• Solid understanding of WebAssembly and its execution environments
• Solid understanding of WebAssembly compilation targets like wasm32-unknown and wasm32-wasi
• Solid understanding of ECMAScript (JavaScript) execution contexts (NodeJS and Browser)
• Practical knowledge of CI environments, specifically GitHub Actions
• Familiarity with Noir, its purpose and other languages that have similar goals
• Being pragmatic and of flexible mindset to satisfy goals and different stages of the product life cycle
• C++ a bonus

Nice-to-have:

• Worked on IDE tools such as language server (LSP) and Debuggers.
• Worked on plugins for an IDE, specifically VSCode
• Developed a software library meant to be used by others
• Developed CI workflows which efficiently deliver software
• Experience with cross-compilation for different platforms and architectures (eg. x86, arm, etc.)
• Experience leading and/or participating in the open-source community
• Familiarity with current blockchain tooling and developer experience (eg. Foundry, Hardhat)
• Knowledge of Circom/Zokrates and ZkEVM
• A love for beautiful abstractions while being pragmatic

Aztec Labs is an equal opportunity employer and we value creativity, diversity, and intellectual curiosity. If you're passionate about leveraging your creative talents to make a real-world impact, and if you want to be part of a team that's shaping the future of digital privacy, then we would love to hear from you.