Site Reliability Engineer – to help us build a decentralised, blockchain-based legal agreements network
We are looking for someone to assist with the evolution and maturation of our platform’s operability
Monax were pioneers of permissioned blockchains and smart contracts and we are building our <a href="https://agreements
network/" rel="nofollow">Agreements Network to allow new and more efficient forms of legal transacting
Exploiting the benefits of various decentralised, distributed, and masterless technologies – chiefly Hyperledger Burrow, which Monax built from scratch and is based on the Tendermint consensus engine
With this we need to move past theoretically proven fault tolerance to practical scalability
The unique DevOps problem we can offer is not just running at significant scale in terms of number of nodes but at scale in terms of number of authorities
How do you administer a network with no administrator?
You will have the chance to work on a system that has distributed consensus and trust-less validation at its heart and offers very interesting challenges, these could be:
- How do you build a monitoring and alerting system for a decentralised platform?
- What governance mechanism converge towards a stable system useful for its members?
- How do you address security vulnerabilities of bugs with no single authority?
Blockchains and decentralised storage systems are closely related to existing distributed databases and object stores and we are looking to blend the best of both worlds
Working closely with our CTO and CEO your focus will be around our Kubernetes-based deployment, blending blockchain-land with more traditional (and battle-tested) DevOps and cloud tooling
We see integration between these worlds as critical to our success and themes such as message queuing, API management, caching, logging, and metrics are all key to that goal
Your role will give you the chance to work across all teams in the business and it will also give you the opportunity to write core code for the platform in support of your role
You will join a business building a genuinely novel system, that in part intends to create an entirely new market by enabling legal products that challenge existing legal services
This role would suit a talented Software Engineering graduate, with around 1-2 years work experience and some knowledge of Kubernetes, or a more experience software engineer who would like to transition to a more DevOps focused role
Who do we need? Someone who:
- Can read Go, Javascript (NodeJS and frontend), Solidity (EVM code), and shell scripts within the first few weeks
- Has some understanding of cloud native tooling such as Kubernetes, Helm, Elasticsearch, and Prometheus
- Has a basic working knowledge of AWS and GCE
- Has some experience of multi-server non-trivial cloud deployments – ideally with containers
It is crucial that you are able to take part in forceful yet respectful technical discussions with colleagues and that you are able to change your mind about something if required, and also are able to change other’s minds
Real things you might work on:
- Figure out how to deploy new validator pools to existing blockchain networks
- Deploy and run IPFS nodes with pinning
- Implement our key signing interface against a cloud based hardware security model
- Secure cross-blockchain communication with elliptic curve diffie-hellman and cryptographic proofs of state
- Develop in cluster monitoring and automatic failover for blockchain nodes which have fallen out of consensus or are no longer connected into their peers
What can Monax offer you?
- Extremely marketable blockchain and cryptocurrency skills
- The chance to make blockchain systems live up to their hype by making them highly operable, our network will be operated peer-to-peer by many parties and this needs to be as painless as possible
- Experience in blending distributed, decentralised, and centralised systems
To spend time working on something foundational at the level of a network architecture
- The chance to spend time thinking ‘around the software’; about law, economics, and game theory
- You will have a high level of autonomy
The business has just enough hierarchy, consensus and individual project responsibility (c
f
design-by-committee) favoured over diktats
- Flexible working – the successful candidate will be based in our London work space primarily, there is scope for flexible working and choosing your own hours and place of work when established
Relocation assistance is available and this role could also be based in our office in Edinburgh City Centre
Who will you be working with?
Around ten people in our passionate cross functional team, including time with:
- Our CTO, who would be your primary contact and coding peer while helping to guide the broader design of the system
- Our CEO in Edinburgh, who has taken the lead in developing our cloud deployment so far and with whom you will have a close working relationship
- Our product and legal engineering teams, based in New York, that you will enable by building a network that can incorporate a diverse range of legal stakeholders
About Monax
Monax would like to build a better system for contracting for the good of humanity and other forms of life
To learn more please visit:
<a href="https://monax
io/" rel="nofollow">Monax Website
<a href="https://agreements
network/" rel="nofollow">Agreements Network
<a href="https://www
hyperledger
org/projects/hyperledger-burrow" rel="nofollow">Hyperledger Burrow