Protocol Researcher (Distributed Systems) Full Time (Remote)

Status is building the tools and infrastructure for the advancement of a secure, private, and open web3.

With the high level goals of preserving the right to privacy, mitigating the risk of censorship, and promoting economic trade in a transparent, open manner, Status is building a community where anyone is welcome to join and contribute.

As an organization, Status seeks to push the web3 ecosystem forward through research, creation of developer tools, and support of the open source community.

As a product, Status is an open source, Ethereum-based app that gives users the power to chat, transact, and access a revolutionary world of DApps on the decentralized web. But Status is also building foundational infrastructure for the whole Ethereum ecosystem, including the Nimbus ETH 1.0 and 2.0 clients, the Keycard hardware wallet, and the Waku messaging protocol (a continuation of Whisper).

As a team, Status has been completely distributed since inception.  Our team is currently 150+ core contributors strong, and welcomes a growing number of community members from all walks of life, scattered all around the globe.

We care deeply about open source, and our organizational structure has minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours. We believe in working with a high degree of autonomy while supporting the organization’s priorities.

Who are we?

Vac builds public good protocols for the decentralized web.

We do applied research based on which we build protocols, libraries and publications. Custodians of protocols that reflect a set of principles – liberty, privacy, etc.

You can see a sample of some of our work here: Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Privacy-preserving p2p economic spam protection in Waku v2, Waku v2 RFC. Our attitude towards ZK: Vac <3 ZK.

The role?

This role will be part of a new team that will make a provable and private WASM engine that runs everywhere. As a compiler engineer, you will be responsible for researching, designing, analyzing and implementing zero-knowledge circuits that allow for proving private computation of execution in WASM. This includes having a deep understanding of relevant ZK proof systems and tooling (zk-SNARK, circom, Plonk/Halo 2, zk-STARK, etc), as well as different architectures (zk-EVM Community Effort, Polygon Hermez and similar) and their trade-offs. You will collaborate with the Vac Research team, and work with requirements from our new Logos program. As one of the first hires of a greenfield project, you are expected to take on significant responsibility, while collaborating with other research engineers, including protocol engineers and senior Rust engineers.

Key responsibilities 

• Research and develop open P2P protocols for secure messaging.
• Research efficient, scaling solutions for P2P communications.
• Build incentivized, distributed systems.
• Use a layered protocol approach that is mindful and explicit about what it requires, what it provides, under what threat models, and with what trade-offs.
• Combine cryptoeconomics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable, scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant system.
• Use libp2p to build application-level protocols.
• Interpret and implement solutions based on academic research.
• Provide feedback on overall design decisions, and participate in code reviews.
• Write Nim code.

You ideally will have 

• A passion for blockchain technology, privacy-preserving technology and decentralization.
• A strong academic background.
• Experience with encryption and key exchange mechanisms.
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust).
• Experience building networking-heavy applications and p2p networking specifically.
• Familiarity with message propagation in loosely connected networks.
• Familiar with p2p building blocks such as gossiping, routing and discovery (DHTs), and Nat traversal.
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum.
• A Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on computer networks.
• A strong alignment to our principles: https://status.im/about/#our-principles

Bonus points if 

• A PhD degree in an area related to computer networks.
• Contributed to a blockchain-related, open source project.
• In in the Ethereum community.
• Experience with cryptography such as OTR, X3DH, Noise protocol.
• Experience with Nim.
• Experience with off-the-shelf networking stacks such as libp2p / devp2p.

[Don’t worry if you don’t meet all of these criteria, we’d still love to hear from you anyway if you think you’d be a great fit for this role. Just explain to us why in your cover letter].

Compensation

We pay a competitive salary based on experience, plus a grant of Status Network Tokens vesting over a three-year period. More info on SNT here here: https://status.im/snt-utility/

Hiring process

The hiring process for this role will be:

• Interview with Angel from our Talent team
• Interview with team member from the Vac team
• Pair programming task with the Vac team
• Interview with Oskar, the Program lead

The steps may change along the way if we see it makes sense to adapt the interview stages, so please consider the above as a guideline.