Lead Distributed Systems Engineer

About PowerLoom

At PowerLoom, we are building a decentralized engine that will be considered as a gold standard for guaranteeing integrity of data that lives on any decentralized protocol and the state of which undergoes transitions continually. It aggregates data to generate snapshots with cryptographic proofs in a decentralized manner. It aims to build trust and offer meaningful insights on demand through a rich ecosystem of peers and stakeholders that are incentivized to participate in the protocol. We are aggressively pursuing bigger milestones for the coming 6 months, and on the lookout for senior developers with hands-on experience in architecting and building distributed systems.

Our co-founders, Swaroop & Anomit are serial entrepreneurs and have been in the blockchain space for 4+ years shipping successful projects like MaticVigil scaling critical infrastructure Polygon to over 1 billion API calls/day. PowerLoom recently raised a $3.1M seed round led by Blockchain Capital.

Responsibilities

As a lead engineer of distributed systems at PowerLoom Protocol, you will be required to

• Lead the technical specification, architecting and implementation of PowerLoom Protocol
  • Map out asynchronous flow controls in the system and resultant sequence of state changes
  • Listen unbiasedly and gather requirements as accurately described in calls/meetings, architectural discussions and engineering documents
  • Take ownership of integral correctness of components and sub-systems
  • Research and stay up-to-date on emerging technologies and standards in the space of decentralized data access, cross-chain interoperability and consensus protocols
  • Integrate the above with PowerLoom Protocol as, and when, applicable
• Contribute to a long-lasting culture of sound engineering practices
• Clearly communicate progress and blockers to stay committed to the project timeline. It is a must for the Lead to
  • be available on camera for remote sync-ups
  • be fluent in spoken as well as written English
• Interface with and report to the CTO

This position is fully remote, handsomely compensated and comes with all the benefits and room for creative freedom that one would expect from such a role. If you are passionate about building systems at scale, solving complex data storage and fingerprinting puzzles, and have already worked on open source projects and/or production scale code, go ahead and apply. You won’t be disappointed.

Please share links to your open source contributions or projects to expedite the selection process.

Distributed Systems specific skills and experience

Our present stack is comprised of components written in Python, Node.js and Go. For this position, 4+ years of experience in programming on at least one of these languages or frameworks is mandatory.

• Knowledge of low level interfaces to Layers 4-7 of the networking stack
• Experience with messaging queues and worker systems built on RabbitMQ/Kafka etc
• Concurrency, asynchronous programming, multiprocessing, multithreading - performance trade-offs and benefits accruing from adopting these strategies
• Comfortable with Unix/Linux fundamentals
  • processes
  • file descriptors
  • shell scripting
  • daemons
  • CLI tools
• Strong grasp of Computer Science fundamentals of State Machines/Finite Automata, Data Structures and Algorithms, Cryptography
• Hands-on experience in architecting and/or implementing distributed systems that satisfy properties of
  • fault tolerance
  • reliability
  • consistency
  • idempotency
  • partitioning
  • message passing and the Actor model
• Experience of working extensively with Git and project management tools that enable fast development and coordination across multiple teams
• Experience with NoSQL data stores and other caches like Redis/Memcached

Cherry on top:

These skills are not a strict requirement to qualify for the role yet can add the extra edge required to engineer a protocol like PowerLoom:

• Prior experience with designing components of P2P systems
• Prior experience with cryptographic libraries
• Familiar with deploying and managing services on cloud platforms like AWS/GCP/Azure
• Familiar with frontend technologies/libraries/frameworks like Node.js / React / Svelte

Remote Work Culture - Benefits and Expectations

• Flexible work hours and zero micro-management over hours clocked and other trivial issues
• Being healthy and fit is an integral part of our company culture and our internal communication channels mirror the same attitude
• Ability to communicate and coordinate asynchronously makes or breaks remote teams. We expect the commitment towards the same from all members of the team. Be adept at long form, asynchronous communication at every step of the planning and development lifecycle -
  • document design decisions
  • maintain architecture diagrams and references for all modules
  • present all information on Slack without the need for second-guessing and extrapolation from other team members
  • Ask questions to your assigned mentor as well as all stakeholders involved in design, development and testing of the feature/codebase/architecture
• Wherever there is a need for synchronous communication with team members, coordinate well in advance and block each other’s calendars to minimize scheduling conflicts