Senior Research Engineer

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 100+ 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.

The role:

You’ll work within a small team to contribute to the design and implementation of the next generation of distributed storage solutions. This effort aligns well with the storage requirements for both the Status chat client as well as the Ethereum ecosystem at large. Familiarity with message propagation in loosely connected networks, DHTs, gossiping and routing mechanisms is highly desirable. Experience with massively distributed systems is a plus. Familiarity with off the shelf networking stacks such as libp2p or devp2p is also desirable.

Responsibilities:

• Write and maintain Nim code.


• Research and design core functionality.


• Provide feedback on overall design decisions and participate in code reviews.


• Use libp2p to build application level protocols.


• Strong understanding of p2p building blocks such as gossiping, routing and discovery (DHTs), Nat traversal.


• Strong understanding of TCP and UDP protocols.


• Strong understanding of encryption and key exchange mechanisms.


• Ability to interpret and implement solutions based on academic research.

You must have:

• Strong passion for blockchain technology and decentralisation.


• Strong academic or engineering background.


• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#).


• Experience with Open Source software.


• Experience building networking heavy applications and p2p networking specifically.

Bonus points if you have:

• Contributed to an blockchain-related, open source project.


• Experience with Nim.


• Experience with libp2p / devp2p, networking, cryptography.


• Worked on storage and file systems.

Hiring process:

The hiring process for this role will be:

1. Interview with Pepper from our People Ops team


2. Interview with Dmitriy, Dagger team lead


3. Peer interview with Mark from Dagger team


4. Final interview with our Head of Research, Jacek.

The steps may change along the way if we see it makes sense to adapt the interview stages, so please consider the above as a guideline.

Please note that although we don’t have an urgent hiring need for this role, we’re always interested to hear from talented candidates that fit this profile. As such, we welcome applications on a rolling basis. Please kindly let us know in your application if your candidacy has any time sensitivity. We’ll be in touch if we think there’s potential for a good fit.