Protocol Engineer (Vac Team)

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 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.

Benefits

People

• Work with some of the most passionate & dedicated minds in the Ethereum space.

Compensation

• We ask that you’re willing to be paid in a combination of fiat and cryptocurrency.
• We’ll reward you with a competitive base salary.
• We’ll also reward you with SNT (Status Network Tokens) to give you a real stake in the success of the organisation.
• A generous budget (€2000 Euros) to choose whatever laptop you prefer.
• We provide a small allowance (up to €250 Euros per month) for a co-working space.

Freedom

• Work from wherever you choose. Our contributors are a varied bunch - some work from home, some from a coworking space, some from a local cafe, others are nomads.
• We operate an open vacation policy, meaning there are no hard limits or strict rules around how much holiday you take and how you schedule it.
• We want our contributors to be healthy and take the time they need to relax and enjoy quality disconnected time away from work.
• We offer all contributors a Headspace subscription.

Travel

• Each team has a travel budget to attend conferences & team meetups of their choice.
• Once per year the whole organisation gets together to connect (so far we’ve visited Bangkok and Prague).

Note: We don’t offer traditional benefits like medical/dental insurance - we’d rather pay you well and give you the freedom to select your own benefits, on your terms.

About Status.im

As a team, Status is completely distributed since inception. Our team is currently 85+ core contributors strong, and welcomes a growing number of community members 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.

Follow along on Our Status.