Systems Engineer (Compiler)

Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with the world's fastest, most reliable, and cost-efficient proof generation through cryptographic software and hardware codesign. We challenge conventional wisdom, simplify complexity, and execute with precision to build category-defining technology. As we continue to scale, we are looking for a talented System Engineer to join our Systems team in Berlin.

Role Overview

As a Compiler Engineer on the Systems Software team, you will work on the translation of algorithms to a cryptographic processor. The vectorized, multicore processors have a custom instruction set designed specifically for binary field operations, and they run in FPGAs in production. The tools you build may be embedded programming languages, special-purpose compilers, and machine emulators. You will work closely with the hardware and cryptography teams on both the instruction set specifications and high-level program representations. This work will have a direct impact on Irreducible’s success by improving the product’s developer experience and performance library APIs, or integrating our stack with blockchain networks.

Necessary Qualifications

• Professional software engineering experience

• Proficiency with Rust or C++

• Experience writing or reverse-engineering CPU assembly code

• Experience writing virtual machine interpreters or emulators

• Experience with programming language design or runtime implementation

• Understanding of software engineering best practices, especially testing

• Familiarity with zero-knowledge cryptography concepts

• Mathematical aptitude

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization

• Functional programming

• Experience writing GPU or vectorized SIMD software

• Experience writing Rust procedural macros

• Experience implementing a compiler or working with compilation frameworks like LLVM

• Understanding of programming language design

• Experience with non-standard ISAs

• Experience with hardware accelerators for AI/ML

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 [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.

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.