About Status
Status is building the tools and infrastructure for the advancement of a secure, private, and open web3
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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
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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
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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 responsibilitiesÂ
Analyze and implement proof systems and architectures for private computation
Design and implement zero knowledge circuits in Rust
Perform security analysis, measure performance of and debug circuits
Write specifications and communicate research findings through write-ups
Break down complex problems, and know what can and what can’t be dealt with later
You ideally will haveÂ
Experience with compilers, VMs, domain-specific languages
Familiarity with Zero-Knowledge Proofs (zk-SNARK, circom, Plonk/Halo2, zk-STARK), elliptic curve cryptography, and circuit design
Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#)
Very strong academic or engineering background (PhD-level or equivalent in industry); relevant research experience
Keen communicator, eager to share your work in a wide variety of contexts, like internal and public presentations, blog posts and academic papers
Experience with Open Source software
Experience in, and passion for, blockchain technology
A strong alignment to our principles:
Bonus points ifÂ
Experience with hardware instruction set architectures
Experience in provable and/or private computation (zkEVM, other ZK VM)
Rust Zero Knowledge tooling
Experience with WebAssembly
[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:Â
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
Interview with Jacek, Research 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
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