Rust Engineer - Cosmos

Rust Engineer - Cosmos

Informal Systems is a full-suite Research & Development institution. We work on bold research problems at the intersection of formal verification and distributed systems and develop high-value distributed systems infrastructure in Rust.

Informal is a core contributor to Cosmos. The Cosmos technology stack, including Tendermint Core, the Cosmos-SDK, IBC, and the Cosmos Proof of Stake modules, is an industry leading toolkit, written in Go, for building, deploying, and running community owned decentralized networks. This technology is used today to secure many billions of dollars in cryptocurrency market capitalization.

However, many of these components were designed in 2016, back when the Cosmos vision of an “Internet of Sovereign, Interoperable Blockchains” was but a dream. Today, it is rapidly becoming a reality, and with it, a new set of requirements and tremendous learnings about the technology stack necessary for the next 5 years. We are building this stack in Rust, including many of the key components of the Cosmos ecosystem, but designed more natively for a multi-chain reality. This includes Hermes, the leading IBC relayer for communication between blockchains, as well as a new multi-chain consensus node based on Tendermint and a new framework for developing secure and verifiable applications in Rust.

As a Rust Engineer in Cosmos, you will have the opportunity to contribute to and lead varioues aspects of this undertaking and work on core, open-source infrastructure at the heart of the emerging Internet of Blockchains.

What your primary responsibilities will be:

• Design and develop our products and software.
• Improve the user experience, correctness, code-quality, and performance of the software.
• Contribute clean, well tested, and well documented code.
• Review issues and pull requests and provide valuable feedback to contributors.
• Mentor other engineers and support the growth and health of the team.
• Guard the quality of the software from technical debt, missing tests or documentation, and feature creep.
• Nurture a safe and enjoyable open source experience for contributors.

What we look for in a successful Rust Engineer:

• At least 3 years developing, releasing, and maintaining production software.
• Significant experience writing Rust or the ability and desire to become proficient in new languages.
• Commitment to product quality, user experience, and well-structured code.
• A track record of designing maintainable APIs that are a delight to use.
• Experience with p2p networking, fault tolerant consensus protocols, blockchain application development, or other related technologies.
• A deep understanding of computer science fundamentals.
• The ability to take ownership and see initiatives through.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, experience working with distributed teams, and enjoys working with and mentoring others.

About Informal:

Informal is a remote-first company with offices in Toronto, Lausanne, Vienna and Berlin. We are structured like a worker’s cooperative, where important corporate actions are subject to one-person-one-vote democratic control by the member-employees. We provide 5-weeks of paid vacation, lifestyle benefits, and annual retreats with the whole team. We envision a sustainable future of cooperatively owned and governed, open-source, distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems and are excited to grow the team with amazing individuals who believe in making this future a reality.