Protocol Engineer (Distributed Systems / Blockchain / Smart Contracts)

About Status

Status is building the tools and infrastructure for the advancement of a secure, private, and open web3.

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.

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 100+ core contributors strong, and welcomes a growing number of community members from all walks of life, scattered all around the globe.

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?

We’re a remote team made up of 70+ core-contributors and a growing community of members scattered around the globe. We care deeply about open source software, and our organizational structure has minimal hierarchy and fixed work hours. We believe in working with a high degree of autonomy while supporting the organization’s priorities.

The role:

We are the Vac team, and we are building a communications tool with security, censorship resistance and privacy in mind; Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Waku v2 Plan, Waku v2 Update. You will help us research and develop new and existing technologies in secure messaging.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and develop open protocols for secure messaging.
• Use a layered protocol approach that is mindful and explicit about what it requires, what it provides, under what threat models, and with what trade-offs.
• Combine cryptoeconomics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable distributed and fault-tolerant system.
• Write and maintain Nim code.
• Research and design core functionality.
• Provide feedback on overall design decisions, and participate in code reviews.
• Use libp2p to build application-level protocols.
• Build incentivized, distributed systems.
• Interpret and implement solutions based on academic research.

Skills Knowledge and Expertise

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!

Ideally you will have:

• A passion for blockchain technology, privacy-preserving technology and decentralization.
• Strong academic or engineering background.
• Experience with encryption and key exchange mechanisms.
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#).
• Experience building networking-heavy applications and p2p networking specifically.
• Familiarity with message propagation in loosely connected networks.
• Familiar with p2p building blocks such as gossiping, routing and discovery (DHTs), and Nat traversal.
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum.

Bonus points if you have:

• Contributed to a blockchain-related, open source project. In in the Ethereum community.
• Experience with cryptography such as OTR, X3DH, Noise protocol.
• Experience with Nim.
• Experience with off-the-shelf networking stacks such as libp2p / devp2p.

Hiring process:

The hiring process for this role will be:

1. Interview with our People Ops team
2. Technical Interview with Hanno/Sanaz (Members of the VAC Team)
3. Pair Programming Interview with Hanno/Sanaz (Members of the VAC Team)
4. Interview with Oskar (VAC Team 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. We’re looking for the new Protocol Engineer to join the team as soon as possible.

Get to know us:

• Find out about the team here.
• More about Waku.