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:
The Codex team is working on a next generation storage engine that attempts to “untie the knot” of incentivized storage. We’re building Codex to be reliable and predictable p2p storage infrastructure that will allow for many business and casual use cases. We rely on strong data possession (PoR and PDP) and incentives schemes to guarantee long term persistence and data availability.

We’re looking for a competent researcher and/or engineer with strong academic or industry background in the following areas:

Proofs of data possession and availability (PoR and PDP, etc…)
Researching or implementing novel or existing cryptographic primitives
Researching or implementing erasure coding schemes (Reed-Solomon, Tornado, etc…)
Researching or implementing incentivized p2p systems
Researching or implementing low level p2p protocols

You will:
Research and develop novel data possession and availability schemes
Combine crypto-economics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable distributed and fault-tolerant systems
Research and develop p2p primitives such as DHTs and Gossip networks
Build incentivized, distributed systems
Write and maintain Nim code
Provide feedback on overall design decisions and participate in code reviews
Use libp2p to build application-level protocols

You should have:
A passion for blockchain, decentralization and privacy-preserving technology
Cryptography and zero-knowledge
Very strong academic or engineering background (PhD-level or equivalent in industry); relevant research experience
Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust or Java/C#)
Experience with Open Source software
Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum
A strong alignment to our principles

Hiring process:
The hiring process for this role will be:

Interview with Pepper from our People Ops team
Interview with Dmitriy, Codex team lead
Peer interview with Mark or Csaba from Codex team
Final interview with Jacek, Program lead
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.

Compensation
We are happy to pay salaries in either 100% fiat or any mix of fiat and/or crypto.