Zero Knowledge Research Engineer

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This role will be part of a new team that will make a provable and private WASM engine that runs everywhere
As a research engineer, you will be responsible for researching, designing, analyzing and implementing 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 compiler engineers and senior Rust engineers

Key responsibilities

  • Research, analyze and design proof systems and architectures for private computation
  • Be familiar and adapt to research needs zero-knowledge circuits written in Rust Design and implement zero-knowledge circuits in Rust
  • 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
  • Perform security analysis, measure performance of and debug circuits

You ideally will have

  • Very strong academic or engineering background (PhD-level or equivalent in industry); relevant research experience
  • Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#)
  • Experience with Open Source software
  • Deep understanding of Zero-Knowledge proof systems (zk-SNARK, circom, Plonk/Halo2, zk-STARK), elliptic curve cryptography, and circuit design
  • Keen communicator, eager to share your work in a wide variety of contexts, like internal and public presentations, blog posts and academic papers
  • Experience in, and passion for, blockchain technology
  • A strong alignment to our principles:

Bonus points if

  • Experience in provable and/or private computation (zkEVM, other ZK VM)
  • Rust Zero Knowledge tooling
  • Experience with WebAssemblyWASM

[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]

Hiring process

The hiring process for this role will be:

  • Interview with our POps team
  • Interview with team member from the Vac team
  • Pair programming task with the Vac team
  • Interview with Vac team lead
  • Interview with Vac 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

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