Research Engineer (Private Information Retrieval)

HashCloak Inc is a R&D lab and consultancy focused on privacy, anonymity and scalability for blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2019, our team is well-known for working on state of the art Ethereum projects such as Ethereum 2.0, Shyft Network and Althea, for pioneering optimistic rollups and bringing forth the first empirical analysis of Ethereum’s privacy guarantees and applications.

We are seeking a founding engineer for an internal private information retrieval project (previously known as kittyworks but now has a new name) in order to help build out the initial product. Then you will be assisting internal teams at HashCloak to integrate this project into their own respective projects.

Your main responsibilities would be to help navigate our internal private information retrieval (PIR) projects and help out with our consulting engagements. We aim to provide you with an environment in which you can explore you interests and contribute to these projects and engagements as you see fit.

Our team is interested in many exiciting areas at the intersection of cryptography, game theory, and finance, such as anonymous networking, private information retrieval, and zero-knowledge proofs. You will be working with a small, and international team based in different time zones around the world. We are a remote-only company and have a very flexible and relaxed culture.

This role is a great fit for someone that is a software engineer that wants to transition into a hybrid role at the intersection of R&D!

Responsibilities

• Build out our initial set of PIR protocols in Golang
• Coordinate with other internal teams on integrating PIR
• Research and design new use cases for PIR
• Assist clients with their cryptography and distributed systems needs
• Contribute to open source projects that we use in our research
• Stay up to date on research and development in the blockchain and cryptography ecosystems

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or above in cryptography, computer science, mathematics or related fields or equivalent experience
• 3+ years programming experience in a systems programming language such as C/C++, Go (Preferred), Rust (Preferred).
• Solid understanding of database technologies
• Solid understanding of database fundamentals such as B/B±trees, LSM trees, etc.
• Knowledge of secure software practices
• Experience in deploying production-ready applications

To Apply

If you are interested in this role, please send an email to Mikerah at with a resume/CV along with something interesting you have built or published. We would love to see some of your previous projects, including open source projects, publications, etc., which would help showcase the highlights of your career.