Senior Rust Engineer

About Heliax

Heliax is a remote-first public goods lab which researches, develops, deploys, and maintains open-source protocols & 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. With team members located around the world, our work culture is characterized by open-allocation, where team members have a high degree of freedom and autonomy in choosing when to work, what to work on, and whom to work with.

Heliax’ work include the Anoma protocol, a novel architecture for blockchains that enables a declarative paradigm for decentralized applications; Namada, a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy; Juvix and Vamp-IR, in the domain of languages for dApps and ZK circuits.

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.

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

Main Project

• The implementation of the Anoma protocol in Rust

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

Remote or local (Zürich/Zug, Berlin). When remote, preferred if mostly located within (+/- 3 hours) Central European time zones. Ideally someone who enjoys nature and hiking 🏔️.