Cryptography Engineer

About Heliax

Heliax is a remote-first public goods lab which researches, develops, deploys, and maintains open-source protocols and mechanisms designed to serve the everyday needs of humanity. Using this, we build vertically integrated open-source products and networks that form coherent open systems which are capable of acting as an alternative to existing exploitative paradigms.

Heliax’s work includes Anoma, the universal intent machine introducing a new era of intent-centric applications; and Namada, the shielded asset hub for multichain, multi-asset data protection, designed to give people full control over sharing their personal information.

Overview

  • Evaluate and analyze existing zkSNARK and zkSTARK proof systems for security, expressivity, and performance; monitor the state of the research field for compelling new theoretical advances
  • Evaluate and analyze existing zkvms such as Cairo, Rics0, Nexus, SP1 and Jolt for expressivity, and performance
  • Update & alter existing cryptographic protocols and arithmetic circuits, customize them for specific proof-of-concept and production use-cases
  • Produce technical specifications for designs & instantiations of cryptographic protocols and assist with implementation in coordination with team members
  • Implement, review, and test cryptographic operations & protocols, primarily in Rust, evaluate existing implementations

Qualifications

  • Prior experience with cryptographic protocols, especially zkSNARKS or zkSTARKs
  • Prior experience in low-level systems programming, ideally in Rust
  • Self-motivated & self-organized

Bonus Qualifications

  • Academic research background in mathematics, computer science, economics, and/or game theory
  • Prior experience with distributed ledger (blockchain) technology
  • Experience in a functional programming language such as Elixir or Haskell
  • Example projects
  • Taiga: A resource machine implementation using Halo2
  • AARM-Cairo: A resource machine implementation using Cairo
  • Anoma Art

Misc

Remote or local (Zürich/Zug, Berlin). Remote or local (Zürich/Zug, Berlin). When remote, preferred if mostly located within Asia.

Ideally someone who enjoys travel, nature and hiking. Often we find that protocols are best designed not in a meeting room but rather on a trail 🏔️.