About Status Status is building the tools and infrastructure for the advancement of a secure, private, and open web3.  With the high level goals of preserving the right to privacy, mitigating the risk of censorship, and promoting economic trade in a transparent, open manner, Status is building a community where anyone is welcome to join and contribute. As an organization, Status seeks to push the web3 ecosystem forward through research, creation of developer tools, and support of the open source community.  As a product, Status is an open source, Ethereum-based app that gives users the power to chat, transact, and access a revolutionary world of DApps on the decentralized web. But Status is also building foundational infrastructure for the whole Ethereum ecosystem, including the Nimbus ETH 1.0 and 2.0 clients, the Keycard hardware wallet, and the Waku messaging protocol (a continuation of Whisper). As a team, Status has been completely distributed since inception.  Our team is currently 150+ core contributors strong, and welcomes a growing number of community members from all walks of life, scattered all around the globe.  We care deeply about open source, and our organizational structure has minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours. We believe in working with a high degree of autonomy while supporting the organization's priorities.

Who are we

Vacbuildspublic good protocols for the decentralized web.

We do applied research based on which we build protocols, libraries and publications. Custodians of protocols that reflect a set of principles - liberty, privacy, etc.

You can see a sample of some of our work here: Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Privacy-preserving p2p economic spam protection in Waku v2, Waku v2 RFC. Our attitude towards ZK: Vac <3 ZK.

The role

This role involves building the RLN primitive for a p2p context, such as Waku, and to bolster validator privacy. As a research engineer, you will be responsible for researching, designing, analyzing and implementing methods which make RLN viable for low-latency, anonymous, rate limiting. 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 knowledge of the protocol that inspired RLN, Semaphore. You will be part of the Vac RLNP2P team, and collaborate with the Vac Research team as well as the Waku Research team.

Key responsibilities 

Apply ZK proof systems to the RLNP2P context

Analyze existing proof systems with the goal of reduce RLN’s proving time

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.

Strong distributed systems experience, or strong network software experience.

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 with libp2p or devp2p

Experience with Nim

Experience with popular zk based identity solutions, such as Semaphore/Unirep/iden3

[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 Logos 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.

Compensation

The expected compensation range for this role is $90,000 - $190,000 (negotiable, dependent on how we assess your skills and experience throughout our interview process. We are happy to pay in any mix of fiat/crypto.

Location

Remote (Worldwide)