Senior Compiler Engineer

Irreducible's mission is to accelerate the zero-knowledge revolution with the world's fastest proof generation. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution, 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 Compiler Engineer.

About the role: 

As a Senior Compiler Engineer, you will build tools to express computations on two types of novel machines, one digital and one virtual. The goals in these areas of our tech stack are:

• Expression of verifiable programs with ZK constraint systems.

• Translation of algorithms to target a custom cryptographic processor running on an FPGA.

You will work closely with the hardware and cryptography teams to define both the instruction sets and high-level program representations. The tools you build may be embedded programming languages, special-purpose compilers, and machine emulators. This work will have a direct impact on Irreducible’s success by improving the product’s developer experience, performance, and security.

Necessary Qualifications

• Proficiency in Rust

• Functional programming

• Experience writing CPU assembly code

• Experience writing virtual machine interpreters or emulators

• Strong written and verbal communications skills

• Ability to think across layers of abstractions

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

• Desire to work in a fast-paced startup environment

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with WebAssembly or RISC-V

• Experience writing compilers

• Experience with non-standard ISAs

• Experience with hardware accelerators for AI/ML

• Understanding of formal verification techniques

• Understanding of zero-knowledge cryptography

Locations supported: 

We’re looking for candidates who are located between the USA East Coast and Central Europe time zones.

We are also in the process of opening an office in Berlin, and are excited to support relocation, on a case by case basis. Once our office is open, we plan to bring the whole company together for ~one week per quarter in Berlin.

We have a globally distributed company, and ensuring the team works in a cohesive way is our main goal.

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. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput. 

You can also find some interesting further material on Irreducible by browsing through the links below:

• Our latest post on Accelerating Sumcheck on GPUs

• Our CEO, Radi, recently presented on our hardware architecture 

• We also recently published a post explaining why binary fields are so efficient in hardware implementation, with thorough estimates of the performance difference in an ASIC compared to modular integer arithmetic-based systems.

• Our first generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case

• Vitalik Buterin breaks down ‘Binius’ as a way to speed up zero-knowledge proofs

• Our cofounders were on an episode of the Zero Knowledge podcast. Have a listen here! 

• Read this for insight into the Market Opportunity for zkProofs 

• The Binius Library on Github:  https://gitlab.com/IrreducibleOSS/binius/ 

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.

Know someone who could be a fit? Feel free to pass along a link to the role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/irreducible/f816578c-bcf1-4705-8144-78f79dc4a98b

To all recruitment agencies: Irreducible does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Irreducible employees, or any other organisation location. Irreducible is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please read our full policy here.