Senior Rust Engineer

Overview

Blockchains do not scale to a global user-base of seven billion people.

Rust engineering at Heliax focuses on building, extending, and maintaining decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant protocols. We are looking for experienced Rust developers that are interested in applying novel research to create high-quality open-source technology and solve outstanding problems in the blockchain space. As a member of the core protocol engineering team, you will be working on distributed ledger technology implemented in Rust, all the way up and down the stack from the P2P layer to consensus algorithms, smart contract systems, proof-of-stake incentive mechanisms, privacy-enhancing cryptographic components, and on-chain governance procedures. This role offers the chance to work closely on compelling cross-disciplinary problems in computer science, systems engineering, cryptography, and economics, and enjoy a high degree of independence in working conditions and prioritization.

Responsibilities

• Produce technical specifications of distributed ledger protocols or protocol upgrades in coordination with other team members
• Evaluate algorithmic complexity, incentive compatibility, and implementation difficulty of possible new protocols
• Implement protocols in performant and cleanly abstracted Rust code
• Comprehensively document and test protocols and protocol changes
• Benchmark implementations and adjust both high-level architecture and low-level details in order to optimise for performance while retaining semantic correctness
• Conduct code reviews in coordination with other team members and help maintain a high standard of quality across the codebase

Qualifications

• Prior experience with systems programming in Rust
• Deep familiarity with Rust abstractions, memory management, and concurrency
• Self-motivated & self-organized
• Interested in open-source technology and research applied to DLT

Bonus Qualifications

• Prior experience with large scale distributed systems
• Prior experience with network and systems engineering
• Prior experience with database design and optimization
• Prior experience in blockchain technology
• Prior experience implementing cryptography

Misc

Competitive compensation in a negotiable mix of salary and equity. Remote or local (Zürich/Zug, Berlin). When remote, preferred if mostly located within (+/- 7 hours) Central European time zones. Ideally someone who enjoys nature and hiking 🏔️.