Protocol Researcher (Remote)

Status is the gateway to the decentralized web. We’re 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. Our core products include an open source, Ethereum-based app for mobile and desktop that gives users the power to chat, make payments and browse the decentralized web, as well as 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 which is a continuation of Whisper.

Who are we?

We’re a remote team made up of ~75 core contributors and a growing number of community members scattered around the globe. We care deeply about open source software, 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.

The project & 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 for more. You will help us research and develop new and existing technologies in secure messaging, see below for some example as well as this general overview of Vac.

What you will be doing:

• Research and develop open protocols for secure messaging. Think zkSNARKs based spam protection/settlement, data consistency in distributed open and hostile environments, incentivized running of nodes, and similar {example a, b, c…}
• 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.

Ideally, you will have:

• A passion for blockchain technology, privacy-preserving technology and decentralization ; a strong alignment to our principles
• Very strong academic or engineering background (PhD-level or equivalent in industry); relevant research experience
• Experience with Zero Knowledge proofs and related technologies.
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#).
• Experience with Open Source software.
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum.

Bonus points if:

• Contributed to a blockchain or privacy-preserving-related, open source project.
• Experience with Nim.
• Experience with libp2p / devp2p, networking, cryptography.

[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. Just explain us why in your application].

Compensation:

We pay a competitive salary based on experience, plus a grant of Status Network Tokens vesting over a three-year period. More info on SNT here. For a full list of Status benefits, see here.

The hiring process for this role:

1. Interview with People Ops team
2. Interview with Oskar, Vac Protocol Research Lead
3. Technical challenge / peer Interview with Sanaz, Vac Protocol Engineer
4. Interview with Jacek, Head Of Research

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.

Get to know us:

Find out about the Vac team here and Waku v2 here.