Senior Research Engineer

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 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.

The role:

The Codex team is working on a next generation storage engine that attempts to “untie the knot” of incentivized storage. We’re building Codex to be reliable and predictable p2p storage infrastructure that will allow for many business and casual use cases. We rely on strong data possession (PoR and PDP) and incentives schemes to guarantee long term persistence and data availability.

We’re looking for a competent researcher and/or engineer with strong academic or industry background in the following areas:

• Proofs of data possession and availability (PoR and PDP, etc…)
• Researching or implementing novel or existing cryptographic primitives
• Researching or implementing erasure coding schemes (Reed-Solomon, Tornado, etc…)
• Researching or implementing incentivized p2p systems
• Researching or implementing low level p2p protocols

You will:

• Research and develop novel data possession and availability schemes
• Combine crypto-economics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable distributed and fault-tolerant systems
• Research and develop p2p primitives such as DHTs and Gossip networks
• Build incentivized, distributed systems
• Write and maintain Nim code
• Provide feedback on overall design decisions and participate in code reviews
• Use libp2p to build application-level protocols

You should have:

• A passion for blockchain, decentralization and privacy-preserving technology
• Cryptography and zero-knowledge
• 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
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum
• A strong alignment to our principles: https://status.im/about/#our-principles

Hiring process:

The hiring process for this role will be:

• Interview with Pepper from our People Ops team
• Interview with Dmitriy, Codex team lead
• Peer interview with Mark or Csaba from Codex team
• Final interview with Jacek, 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:

We are happy to pay salaries in either 100% fiat or any mix of fiat and/or crypto. For more information regarding benefits at Status: https://people-ops.status.im/tag/perks/

Please note that although we don't have an urgent hiring need for this role, we're always interested to hear from talented candidates that fit this profile. As such, we welcome applications on a rolling basis. Please kindly let us know in your application if your candidacy has any time sensitivity. We'll be in touch if we think there's potential for a good fit.