Staff Cryptography Engineer (Rust)

Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with the world's fastest, most reliable, and cost-efficient proof generation through cryptographic software and hardware codesign. We challenge conventional wisdom, simplify complexity, and execute with precision to build category-defining technology. As we continue to scale, we are looking for a talented Rust Engineer to join our Cryptography team in Berlin.

As a Cryptographic Rust Engineer, you'd join our Binius (binary field proof system) team, and take ownership of protocol implementation work across our cryptographic stack. You'll work both on the core open-source library and on applications of it. We're looking for a strong software engineer first and foremost—someone who can quickly learn and internalize complex protocols, work closely with researchers to translate abstract math into concrete, performant code, and help shape decisions around how protocols are batched, connected, and optimized.

You’ll be expected to operate with high autonomy, owning technical execution and collaborating across research and hardware teams to ensure clean abstractions, efficient memory layouts, and robust edge-case handling. The ideal candidate is not only capable of identifying implementation gaps but also energized by filling them.

Being a self-starter is essential, as there are always a variety of challenges that need to be tackled. Your work will have a direct impact on our growth and success. At the Staff or Principal level, there will also be an expectation to mentor and guide engineers across the team, providing leadership in Rust development practices, code reviews, and architecture. As a Staff or Principal Engineer, you'll not only help shape our technical direction but also support the growth of the team by sharing knowledge, offering guidance on complex challenges, and fostering a culture of learning and collaboration.

• In-person in Berlin, Germany: We are excited to support relocation for candidates interested in working in-person 3 days a week from our Mitte, Berlin office.

  • Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas for this role. However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, but we can't make any guarantees.

• Remote: We are open to candidates who are located between the USA East Coast and Central Europe time zones. We'll expect you to come to the office approximately once per quarter for 1-2 weeks for company on-sites and/or team sprints. Please note: we are more selective for fully remote candidates.

We have a globally distributed company, and ensuring the team works in a cohesive way is our main goal.

• Significant professional Rust experience

• Experience implementing cryptographic protocols

• Familiarity with zero-knowledge cryptography concepts

• Experience with performance tuning and working with a research team on optimization

• Understanding of software engineering best practices, especially testing

• Mathematical aptitude

• Familiarity with software design patterns

• Ability to think across layers of abstractions

• Understanding of technology tradeoffs and a pragmatic approach to problem solving

• Experience modifying and contributing to open-source codebases

• Competitive programming experience

• Understanding of fundamental blockchain concepts

• Ability to read and understand cryptography research

• Experience with purely functional or logic programming languages

• Experience with ZK circuit programming

• Mentor and guide engineers across the team, providing leadership in Rust development practices, code reviews, and architecture

We're building out a high-performance, cost-efficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs. Verifiable computing with zk-SNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that today's blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zk-SNARKs to prove smart contract executions, such as Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync, are already in production. We believe there is a big market opportunity to generate proofs for these networks at scale in a cost-effective way [1]. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput. 

We take the approach of co-designing hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation end-to-end. Our first-generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case [2].

We also conduct cryptography research to identify computationally efficient algorithms for verifiable computing. These research efforts produced a novel cryptographic construction based on towers of binary fields called Binius [3] [4], which we are currently developing into a production-grade system.

Our team has cross-domain expertise and includes hardware designers, low-level systems software engineers, cryptography engineers, and data center specialists, several of whom worked in HFT previously.

[1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware

[2] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fpga-architecture-for-goldilocks-ntt

[3] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/binius-hardware-optimized-snark

[4] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-binius-improve-zero-knowledge-proofs

[5] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/introducing-ulvetanna

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where talented individuals can thrive and grow. We value the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that each person brings to our team. Even if you don't fit 100% of the job's necessary qualifications, we'd still love to hear from you.

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