Rust Engineer, Cryptography Team

Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with the world's fastest, most reliable, and cost-efficient proof generation through cryptographic software and hardware codesign. We challenge conventional wisdom, simplify complexity, and execute with precision to build category-defining technology. As we continue to scale, we are looking for a talented Rust Engineer to join our Cryptography team in Berlin.

Role Overview

As a Rust Engineer on the Cryptography team, you will be working on Binius, our binary field proof system, both on the core open-source library and on applications of it. The responsibilities will include improving functionality, performance, and developer-friendliness of the cryptography code. Your days might involve performance optimization of parallelized computations, implementing more efficient algorithms, improving API, and profiling and benchmarking against competing projects. You will work on a cross-functional team, collaborating with cryptographers and research engineers to design and implement efficient algorithms.

Role Location

This role is based in Berlin. You must be located there, or open to relocation.

Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas for this role. However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, but we can't make any guarantees.

You’ll need to be in the office three days per week, in addition to more on “as needed” basis. For example, if we have a week-long company offsite, you’ll need to be in the office the entire time.

Necessary Qualifications

• Significant professional Rust experience

• Understanding of software engineering best practices, especially testing

• Familiarity with software design patterns

• Familiarity with zero-knowledge cryptography concepts

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization

• Mathematical aptitude

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience modifying and contributing to open-source codebases

• Competitive programming experience

• Understanding of fundamental blockchain concepts

• Ability to read and understand cryptography research

• Experience with purely functional or logic programming languages

• Experience with ZK circuit programming

• Experience implementing cryptographic protocols

• Mentor and guide engineers across the team, providing leadership in Rust development practices, code reviews, and architecture

About Us (deep dive)

We're building out a high-performance, cost-efficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs. Verifiable computing with zk-SNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that today's blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zk-SNARKs to prove smart contract executions, such as Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync, are already in production. We believe there is a big market opportunity to generate proofs for these networks at scale in a cost-effective way [1]. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput. 

We take the approach of co-designing hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation end-to-end. Our first-generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case [2].

We also conduct cryptography research to identify computationally efficient algorithms for verifiable computing. These research efforts produced a novel cryptographic construction based on towers of binary fields called Binius [3] [4], which we are currently developing into a production-grade system.

Our team has cross-domain expertise and includes hardware designers, low-level systems software engineers, cryptography engineers, and data center specialists, several of whom worked in HFT previously.

[1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware

[2] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fpga-architecture-for-goldilocks-ntt

[3] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/binius-hardware-optimized-snark

[4] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-binius-improve-zero-knowledge-proofs

[5] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/introducing-ulvetanna

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where talented individuals can thrive and grow. We value the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that each person brings to our team. Even if you don't fit 100% of the job's necessary qualifications, we'd still love to hear from you.

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