Embedded Security Engineer

Prysmatic Labs currently builds the underlying code for the Ethereum blockchain, building a more fair, open, and censorship-resistant Internet. On Ethereum, anyone can deploy software that controls digital value and is accessible around the world. Born in 2014, the Ethereum network houses billions of dollars worth of value today, hosting projects such as:

• — Global, decentralized organizations
• — Non-reserve backed, stable-value currencies
• — Fully-open, permissionless, financial applications

We believe Ethereum represents a fundamental shift in how financial and coordination systems operate. Our work is open source and accessible to anyone around the world, and we are seeking individuals that also align with these values.

We are looking for a remote, full-time embedded security engineer to keep pushing the envelope on decentralized technologies. Particularly, having experience in penetration testing and Golang is a huge plus.

What We Build

The Ethereum blockchain today suffers from a key set of problems, using a wasteful proof of work algorithm in which miners around the world spend large amounts of electricity to package transactions into blocks. For over 4 years, researchers have been working on a better, more efficient consensus algorithm known as proof of stake along with a scalability method for the system known as sharding. No blockchain so far has been able to find the right balance of security, scalability, and decentralization, and we are thrilled to work on the cutting-edge every day to accomplish this task.

We’re currently building the foundational code behind the future of the Ethereum project, known as Ethereum 2.0. Our flagship project, Prysm, is a full implementation of the next generation Ethereum blockchain written in Golang. Prysm utilizes the top technologies for production servers and interprocess communication, using Google's gRPC library, Docker, Kubernetes, and more.

Ethereum 2.0 is a multi-year project split into phases. The first phase launched December 1, 2020. At the time of writing, the Ethereum 2.0 network secures around $16 billion USD worth of value. Prysm runs a large portion of the network today. At Prysmatic Labs, the lines of code you write will be mission critical towards securing a multi-billion dollar network.

Who We Are

Prysmatic Labs started in early 2018 after a few of us on our team were curious about contributing to blockchain technology and posted on reddit and various forums trying to find other similar individuals to contribute to open source code. We realized scalability was the biggest problem the Ethereum blockchain was facing and wanted to take a stab at it given there was little work on the matter happening at that time. Our teammates have significant experience as software engineers having worked on cloud, networking, and systems design at enterprises such as Google and Riverbed Technologies.

We all began as volunteers writing Go code to implement a minimal sharding specification for Ethereum during our free time, and were noticed by the Ethereum Foundation and a few other groups for the work we were doing. Since the early days as a hobby project until today, we have received significant funding to work on Ethereum full-time. Today, we love to work at Prysmatic because of our motivation to build revolutionary technology while having fun doing so – the same reasons we started this project in the first place.

Our Core Values

“Software engineering is what happens to programming when you add time and other programmers” — Russ Cox

We believe good software engineering is more about excellent communication, careful design decisions, and problem solving rather than knowing the internals of a code library or API. At Prysmatic, we’re not afraid to look at documentation, stack overflow, and any other sources of information that can help us get the job done. Instead, we prioritize designing straightforward software solutions from first principles, creating design documents before writing any code.

Code quality is our most critical ingredient to keeping our platform open. Before we write new features, we focus on high quality testing, documentation, and ensuring code is maintainable. Our team uses a variety of technologies, including Golang, Docker, and Kubernetes to build the best possible suite of tools for blockchain technology. We believe good software engineers can pick up new technologies and learn how to use the best tools for the job rather than being nitpicky about being an expert in a specific framework or package.

We do not work as lone wolves, “rockstar coders”, or “10x devs.” Instead, we focus on deep teamwork to write code that lasts the test of time. We focus being concise rather than being clever. We care not only about the quality of our work but also about how we work together. It is the camaraderie, motivation, and fun we all have that makes working at Prysmatic a special experience. The code we write is mission critical towards securing billions of dollars and a powerful, new financial system. We all take good care and ownership of our code, and we’ll expect you to do the same when joining the team.