Zero Knowledge Research Engineer

This role will be part of a new team that will make a provable and private WASM engine that runs everywhere. As a research engineer, you will be responsible for researching, designing, analyzing and implementing circuits that allow for proving private computation of execution in WASM. This includes having a deep understanding of relevant ZK proof systems and tooling (zk-SNARK, Circom, Plonk/Halo 2, zk-STARK, etc), as well as different architectures (zk-EVM Community Effort, Polygon Hermez and similar) and their trade-offs. You will collaborate with the Vac Research team, and work with requirements from our new Logos program. As one of the first hires of a greenfield project, you are expected to take on significant responsibility,  while collaborating with other research engineers, including compiler engineers and senior Rust engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Research, analyze and design proof systems and architectures for private computation
• Be familiar and adapt to research needs zero-knowledge circuits written in Rust Design and implement zero-knowledge circuits in Rust
• Write specifications and communicate research findings through write-ups
• Break down complex problems, and know what can and what can’t be dealt with later
• Perform security analysis, measure performance of and debug circuits

You ideally will have

• Very strong academic or engineering background (PhD-level or equivalent in industry); relevant research experience
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#)
• Experience with Open Source software
• Deep understanding of Zero-Knowledge proof systems (zk-SNARK, circom, Plonk/Halo2, zk-STARK), elliptic curve cryptography, and circuit design
• Keen communicator, eager to share your work in a wide variety of contexts, like internal and public presentations, blog posts and academic papers.
• Experience in, and passion for, blockchain technology.
• A strong alignment to our principles: https://status.im/about/#our-principles

Bonus points if

• Experience in provable and/or private computation (zkEVM, other ZK VM)
• Rust Zero Knowledge tooling
• Experience with WebAssemblyWASM

[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 to us why in your cover letter].

Hiring process

The hiring process for this role will be:

• Interview with our POps team
• Interview with team member from the Vac team
• Pair programming task with the Vac team
• Interview with Vac team lead
• Interview with Vac Program lead

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.