Protocol Engineer, Zurich or Remote

Posted 3 years ago  • Zürich, Switzerland

At HOPR Association we are working on a challenging and foundational infrastructure component of the web3: a decentralised and incentivised mix network that allows any two parties to exchange data without third parties knowing that they are communicating and without leaking any other metadata.

Please note: for this position, it is possible to work remotely or from our office in Zurich, Switzerland.

What you’ll be creating + working on:

  • Lead research and development efforts on the intersection between decentralized networks and privacy infrastructure
  • Design, implement and refine the HOPR protocol. You can see the HOPR protocol at https://github.com/hoprnet
  • The current version of the HOPR protocol is the bare minimal core that needs a wealth of interconnected components to make a privacy-respecting web3 stack a reality. You are expected to design and implement these layers with a growing team. Examples are overlay networks, packet retransmission, routing in a decentralized setting and dynamic resource allocation
  • Support and work with the community of developers, users, investors, enthusiasts who want to use HOPR

What you bring to the team:

  • Communicative team player who can work with and lead a development team in a fast-paced environment
  • Desire to work on the future of privacy and trail-blaze the future of non-corporate work
  • An affinity to free and open source software and community-focussed development
  • Theoretical knowledge and practical experience with the internet protocol stack and protocols, minimally: IP, TCP, UDP, (QUIC,) DNS, WebRTC
  • Familiarity with mixnet infrastructure and Tor along with existing limitations and issues
  • Familiarity with mechanisms and common issues, minimally: proxies, NAT, firewalls, packet loss &retransmission
  • Minimally 5 years hands-on development experience delivering Javascript applications in production settings

We’d be even more amazed by:

Ideally, a suitable candidate fulfils as much as possible from the following list (in order of relevance):

  • Experience with libp2p
  • Familiarity with elliptic curve cryptographic in theory and practice in general and pairing-based cryptography specifically
  • Experience with collaborative research projects and scholarly communication
  • Zero knowledge protocols such as zk-SNARKs, Bulletproofs, zk-STARKs, zk-Rollups, Optimistic Rollups
  • Theoretical and practical knowledge of blockchain and crypto assets in general
  • Familiarity with Ethereum and the EVM
  • Motivation to communicate about your work: blogs, conferences, social media
  • Experience and curiosity to work for and on a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) and decentralised governance