Rust Core Developer – ink! (Smart Contracts) Full Time (Remote)

Parity Technologies builds core infrastructure for blockchains and Web 3.0 technologies. This means dealing with P2P networking, consensus algorithms, cryptography, databases, and decentralized applications. We strive to write the fastest, lightest, and safest core technology in Blockchain and write lots of open-source code.

Parity works in a very flat hierarchy with lots of autonomy and high levels of personal responsibility, and we try to mimic an open-source workflow in much of what we do. We have an older article on our blog about our development practices which you may want to read.

About the position:

This position can be remote or based near one of our offices in Berlin, Lisbon, or London. It’s up to you to decide where you work best.

For this role you will be mostly working on Parity’s ink! ‒ a domain-specific language to write smart contracts in Rust for blockchains built on the Substrate framework. ink! is an opinionated way of how we think writing smart contracts in Rust should be done. Rust has great support for WebAssembly and we make use of this by compiling ink! smart contracts to WebAssembly.

A big priority for us is the developer experience of developing smart contracts with ink!. This means the language itself, the APIs we expose, language primitives, etc.. But also surrounding tooling for e.g. testing/fuzzing smart contracts or automatically analyzing contracts for security flaws via our own ink! linter. Besides this a number of other hard challenges exist. One of those is that we are constantly optimising our contracts so that they are compiled to as-small-as-possible WebAssembly blobs ‒ this is important for e.g. user-paid gas fees and transaction throughput.

There is a lot of room for innovation in ink! and we’re trying hard to stay ahead of our competition. Each month we select one competing project that someone from our team does a deep dive in and we discuss the results.

Improving performance, integrating XCM (i.e. asynchronous operations that enable interoperability with other chains), and getting WebAssembly smart contracts on par with the Solidity ecosystem are some of the things on our roadmap.

You will be working with the ink! team and have a close collaboration with the people working on Substrate’s smart contracts module, as well as the Contracts UI ‒ a web application to deploy and interact with smart contracts.

We are a fast moving team, some of us are living in Berlin, but we’re primarily remote. We have regular team retreats in nice locations to discuss technical challenges, do hackathons, and socialise. It’s important to us that we’re all having fun along the way and we’re a humorous bunch.

We are primarily developers, but besides that we engage with the community, talk to teams building with ink!, answer questions in our StackExchange community, and maintain our own documentation and tutorials. That’s something we would like to see from you as well.

We’re flexible on the exact scope of the role, so if your prior position was e.g. as a Solidity developer or in a Developer Relations role and you’re thinking of doing more Rust ‒ this role might be just the job you have been looking for.

Requirements:

Experience with Rust.

• Familiarity with the Rust ecosystem.
• Knowledge of Bitcoin, Ethereum or other blockchain technologies.
• An interest in decentralized technology and Web 3.

Nice to have:

Knowledge in one of the following areas is especially appreciated.

• Knowledge of Solidity or other smart contract programming languages.
• Experience implementing decentralized applications (Dapps), including “Layer 1” and “Layer 2” approaches.

Benefits:

• Competitive salaries and benefits.
• Opportunity to become an expert in the latest blockchain technologies.
• Working at Parity means focusing on stuff that matters: building cutting-edge technology for a better and more decentralized internet. Our teams enjoy a high degree of freedom and autonomy to achieve that goal.
• Because we value initiative and learning, we’ve defined a generous personal improvement budget to attend conferences or skills courses of your own choosing. We think you know what’s best for you!
• Parity is a diverse company with people from various countries and we will support you with German or English language courses where needed (and desired).
• We have a remote-friendly company setup.
• Bringing the team together is something we value a lot and we have regular company retreats (or will have, pending the Covid pandemic).

Not a perfect match to our requirements? We’re happy to receive your application anyways and hear how you think you can help us achieve our mission.