Distributed Systems Researcher (Blockchain)

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 150+ 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.

About Logos

A group of Status Contributors is also involved in a new community lead project, called Logos, and this particular role will enable you to also focus on this project. 

Logos is a grassroots movement to provide trust-minimized, corruption-resistant governing services and social institutions to underserved citizens. 

Logos’ infrastructure will provide a base for the provisioning of the next generation of governing services and social institutions - paving the way to economic opportunities for those who need them most, whilst respecting basic human rights through the network’s design. 

You can read more about Logos here: A Declaration of Independence for mindful readers like yourself.

Logos Blockchain Infra Team

We are building the foundation used by other projects at Logos technology. We are researching consensus algorithms, Multi-Party Computation techniques, ZKPs and other cutting-edge technologies with the aim to take the blockchain to the next level of security, decentralization and scalability, with a special focus on privacy as a fundamental right. We are currently in a research phase, working with models and simulations. In the near future, we will start implementing the research. You will have the opportunity to participate in developing -and improving- the state of the art of blockchain technologies, as well as turning it into a reality.

Key Responsibilities

• This role is dedicated to applied research. In our initial phases, we are dedicated to understanding and leveraging the state-of-the-art, while in future phases we will advance it.


• Primarily, the researcher will contribute to the design of new architectural solutions, as well as evaluate the work of other members of the team.


• Design, specify and verify distributed systems by leveraging formal and experimental techniques.


• Build proof of concepts and prepare executable specifications for the development team.


• Regularly going through papers, bringing new ideas and staying up-to-date.


• Conducting theoretical and practical analysis of the performance of distributed systems.


• Collaborating with both internal and external contributors.


• Presenting research results both internally and externally (internal documents, blog posts and presentations).

Ideally, you will have

[Don’t worry if you don’t meet all of these criteria, we’d still love to hear from you anyway if you think you’d be a great fit for this role!]

• Strong background in Computer Science and Math, or a related area.


• Distributed Systems experience with a focus on Blockchain.


• Coding experience.


• Deep knowledge of algorithms.


• Experience in analyzing the correctness of distributed systems.


• Comfortable with “reverse engineering” code in a number of languages including Java, Go, Rust, etc. If no experience in these languages, the ability to read and understand code of other projects is useful to understand other real-world systems.


• Keen communicator, eager to share your work in a wide variety of contexts, like internal and public presentations, blog posts and academic papers.


• Passionate about blockchain technology in general.


• A strong alignment to our principles

Bonus points

• Experience working for an open-source organization. 


• PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related area. 


• Track record of scientific publications.

Hiring process

1. Interview with our People Ops team


2. Interview with Team Lead


3. Interview with Team Member


4. Interview with Program Lead

Compensation

We are happy to pay in any mix of fiat/crypto.