Research 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 Research Engineer to join our Cryptography team.

Role Overview

As a Research 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 security of the cryptography code. Your days might involve implementing new cryptographic protocols, designing and implementing more efficient algorithms, and working on system architecture improvements. You will work on a cross-functional team, collaborating with cryptographers and software engineers to adapt and apply the latest zero-knowledge cryptography research. There may be opportunities to contribute directly to Irreducible’s cryptography research publications.

Locations Supported

• In-person in Berlin, Germany: We are excited to support relocation for candidates interested in working in-person 3 days a week from our Mitte, Berlin office.

  • 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.

• Remote: We are open to candidates who are located between the USA East Coast and Central Europe time zones. We'll expect you to come to the office approximately once per quarter for 1-2 weeks for company on-sites and/or team sprints. Please note: we are more selective for fully remote candidates.

We have a globally distributed company, and ensuring the team works in a cohesive way is our main goal.

Necessary Qualifications

• Significant professional software engineering experience

• Proficiency with Rust

• Understanding of software engineering best practices, especially testing

• Ability to read and understand cryptography research

• Deep familiarity with zero-knowledge cryptography concepts

• Experience implementing cryptographic protocols

• Mathematical aptitude, especially in linear and abstract algebra

Bonus Qualifications

• Competitive programming experience

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization

• Understanding of fundamental blockchain concepts

• Familiarity with software design patterns

• Experience with computer algebra systems such as SageMath

• Published cryptographic research

• Experience with ZK circuit programming

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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