Protocol Engineer

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 100+ 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: 

We are the Vac team, and we are building a communications tool with security, censorship resistance and privacy in mind; Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Waku v2 Plan, Waku v2 Update. You will help us research and develop new and existing technologies in secure messaging. You will help design crypto economic system for our protocols and embedded incentivisation into them, so designing the rules & implementing them.

The role: 

We are the Vac team, and we are building a communications tool with security, censorship resistance and privacy in mind; Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Waku v2 Plan, Waku v2 Update. You will help us research and develop new and existing technologies in secure messaging.

Responsibilities:

• Research and develop open protocols for secure messaging.
• Use a layered protocol approach that is mindful and explicit about what it requires, what it provides, under what threat models, and with what trade-offs.
• Combine cryptoeconomics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable distributed and fault-tolerant system.
• Write and maintain Nim code.
• Research and design core functionality.
• Provide feedback on overall design decisions, and participate in code reviews.
• Use libp2p to build application-level protocols.
• Build incentivized, distributed systems.
• Interpret and implement solutions based on academic research.

Ideally you will have:

[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!]

• A passion for blockchain technology, privacy-preserving technology and decentralization.
• Strong academic or engineering background.
• Experience with encryption and key exchange mechanisms.
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#).
• Experience building networking-heavy applications and p2p networking specifically.
• Familiarity with message propagation in loosely connected networks.
• Familiar with p2p building blocks such as gossiping, routing and discovery (DHTs), and Nat traversal.
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum.

Bonus points if you have:

• Contributed to a blockchain-related, open source project.
• In in the Ethereum community.
• Experience with cryptography such as OTR, X3DH, Noise protocol.
• Experience with Nim.
• Experience with off-the-shelf networking stacks such as libp2p / devp2p