Senior 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, a novel architecture that is intent-centric for decentralized counterparty discovery, solving, information flow control, and multi-chain atomic settlement; Namada, a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy, designed to bring the best privacy to the multichain and with the vision of building a portal between public and private worlds.
Role Overview
The systems of coordination and finance in our world today are not private enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a senior engineer interested in helping us quickly, safely, and performantly implement the distributed operating system Anoma. As a member of the Anoma engineering team, you will be working on distributed ledger technology implemented in Elixir, all the way up and down the stack from the P2P layer to consensus algorithms, transaction execution systems, and privacy-enhancing cryptographic components.
This role offers the chance to work closely with experts and researchers in various domains. From cryptography to distributed systems research, a good sample of the work we do can be found on our Anoma Research Topics page. The job of Anoma engineering is often to help synthesise ideas found in research into an integrated system. In practice, this means that the role will include giving feedback to researchers about their designs, shaping their research to help fit an integrated system, and ultimately implementing the ideas in Elixir.
The role offers a chance to work and develop in an interactive Elixir codebase. In particular, we encourage tooling (visual or otherwise) that can help explain the system to others.
Responsibilities
- Evaluate algorithmic complexity and implementation difficulty of possible new protocols, giving feedback to researchers and organisational leadership.
- Implement protocols in performant and cleanly abstracted Elixir (and occasionally Rust or C) code.
- Benchmark implementations and adjust both high-level architecture and low-level details in order to optimise for performance while retaining semantic correctness.
- Comprehensively document and test protocols and protocol changes; conduct code reviews in coordination with other team members; help maintain a high standard of quality across the codebase.
- Help bring Anoma to production!
Qualifications
- Experience with Erlang, Elixir, or similar.
- Ability to work independently and reliably without extensive supervision.
- Familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, network/systems engineering, blockchain technology, and/or database system design and optimization.
- Good communication and collaboration skills; experience working with both engineers and researchers.
- Industry experience in bringing systems to production.
- Ability to regularly join meetings in evening European time (e.g. 14-19 CET).
Misc
- Must be willing to travel to Europe for initial onboarding, and several times a year for team retreats (these costs are covered by Heliax).
- 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.