Core Engineer

The Role

The role as a Core Engineer within the Zcash Foundation team will be responsible for working with the engineering team to build Zebra and its associated projects. The ideal candidate will embody the Foundation’s values while fully aligning with its mission and goals. Currently the engineering team is working on Zebra, an independent implementation of the Zcash protocol written in Rust, and over the coming year, the team will expand its scope to include user-facing functionality, as well as new functionality, such as support for FROST. The position reports to the Zcash Foundation’s engineering manager.

Responsibilities will include:

• Implementing the core Zcash protocol and associated functionality
• Maintaining deployed software, fixing bugs, and identifying improvements to the protocol for the future.
• Writing about our work, and interfacing with external stakeholders such as those who use our software and interoperable implementations of the Zcash protocol.

The ideal candidate will likely possess many (but not necessarily all) of the following personal attributes, skills, and experience:

• Experience building software in the Rust programming language
• Strong testing skills, including writing automated tests
• Experience designing and/or implementing complex distributed systems.
• Computer science background
• Experience designing and/or implementing zero-knowledge proof systems
• Deep technical understanding of internet privacy technologies
• Team player
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Knowledge of cryptocurrencies, particularly Zcash.

About the Zcash Foundation

The Zcash Foundation is a 501(c)(3), nonprofit, public charity that builds and supports privacy infrastructure for the public good. We work on strengthening financial privacy with technology, focusing primarily on the Zcash protocol and blockchain.

We are looking for someone who is as excited as we are about building private financial infrastructure for the public good.

Why work for the Zcash Foundation?

• We are a small start-up nonprofit whose impact exceeds its size.
• Everything we build is open source.
• We are team-oriented and mission-driven.
• We are a fully remote organization, with team members in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Spain, the United Kingdom, United States, and Uruguay.
• Leadership cares deeply about staff health and fulfillment.
• Nonprofit means what it says! We build and support innovation that serves our mission.

We offer:

• A competitive salary based on experience
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for employees and dependents
• Contribution to employee’s Health Savings Account or to a health insurance deductible
• Parental leave benefits
• 32 days of PTO
• Annual technology credit to support remote work
• Remote working, with a flexible work schedule—driven by results, not hours
• Professional growth opportunities
• The opportunity to work with a talented, dynamic, diverse and committed team

It is the Zcash Foundation’s policy to provide equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital or domestic partner status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, physical characteristics, family care, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law. In addition, the Zcash Foundation will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

Application Instructions

When evaluating candidates, the Foundation will primarily evaluate candidates on the results of their take home project and interviews. Additionally, we look at work samples and collaborative interviews for further evaluation.

To apply, please submit the following at the link:

• Software sample
• Writing sample
• Presentation sample
• Resume (or equivalent)

We will follow up within a week of your submission.

Software Sample

We expect this position to contribute to producing engineering artifacts that meet the needs of our projects. We use past work to evaluate how you will likely perform in future work for the foundation. If you don’t have existing public work, that’s OK – just pick something you’ve done and describe it for us in as much detail as necessary to understand it.

Writing Sample

• We work remotely on an open source project, so most of our communication with each other, our users, and external contributors happens through text. Send us some writing that you’re proud of. This could be something like:
• Block comment in source code
• Blog post or other long-form article
• Github or forum post (preferably discussing a technical topic)
• Design document or specification
• Whitepaper or academic publication

Presentation Sample

It’s important to be able to make our work legible both to our collaborators and to the public we serve. Along with writing well, oral presentation skills are an important vehicle for this kind of communication. If you’ve given a technical presentation that is publicly available, please provide a link to the slides and video (if available).

If you don’t have a publicly available presentation, please describe a topic you’ve presented in the past.

Interview Process

There will be two technical interviews and at least one non-technical interview, all conducted over video chat.

A take home coding exercise, in which you will be asked to complete a task in the Zebra codebase, which we estimate to take 4-6 hours. The results of the exercise will be reviewed as part of a ‘code review’ video call / interview.

One technical interview will focus on work style and take the form of a pairing interview. You and your interviewer will pick an open issue in one of our projects and work on fixing it together.

The other technical interview will be a system design interview. You and your interviewer will talk through a model distributed system that’s representative of the kind of things we work on.

The non-technical interview will be a conversation focused on your alignment with the Foundation’s values, mission and goals.

All interviews will be conducted over Google Meet.