Smart Contract Jobs

Rust Core Developer - Staking/PoS Engineer

Context

Polkadot offers commoditized security in the form of validating state transitions for independent, parallel chains. Thus, staking, the economic system determining the set of authorities who can validate, is of the utmost importance. Polkadot uses Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS). The NPoS system of Polkadot is powered by Substrate’s FRAME framework, as a collection of modules (aka. Pallets), and multiple offchain instruments, tools and monitoring systems. In the future, Parity aims to migrate the majority of the NPoS system to its dedicated common-good parachain.

The Staking team (itself being a subset of the FRAME team) is looking for more engineers to achieve this grand goal. We need to develop, maintain, and deploy our next generation staking solutions, oversee their deployment, and continuously monitor them for correctness.

This goal enables Polkadot to scale to a network of stakeholder orders of magnitude larger, whilst maintaining an unparalleled degree of economic security and inclusion, which in turn will allow it to scale its parachain onboarding capacity.

What you will do

You will join the FRAME team as a core developer, where you will work closely with other engineers to maintain and develop the entire FRAME framework, with an emphasis on aspects that are related to the NPoS system. Moreover, you will work closely with the common-good parachains team, focusing on technologies such as Cross-chain Messaging (XCM).

Responsibilities

• Write clean, scalable, and “absolutely correct” runtime code aligned with all the standards of FRAME development.
• Maintain, refactor, and optimize existing runtime modules for scaling and long term use.
• Use XCM, parachains, Polkadot and its test-networks, paving the way for development of more common good parachains.
• Write extensive test-frameworks that help us battle-test every single aspect of the NPoS system to the utmost extent.
• Maintain a high degree of transparency and communication with the Polkadot community.
• Communicate and collaborate with researchers, implementing their ideas and providing feedback back to them about their feasibility.
• Extend the general FRAME API as a framework for blockchain runtime development, optimizing it for ease of use and correctness.

Requirement

• Experience working with Rust or other similar system level languages.
• Knowledge of Blockchain protocols and applications.
• Experience managing the full lifecycle of software projects: development, deployment, maintenance and monitoring.
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills.

Nice-to-haves

• Proven experience as a Smart Contract (Solidity) or Substrate Runtime (FRAME) developer.
• Knowledge of the other flavorus of Proof of Stake and their implementations.
• Experience with writing code in highly-available, highly-sensitive systems.
• Experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, and React for tool development.
• Open source software background.

Benefits

• Working on NPoS means working on one of the most impactful aspects of Polkadot: Your code directly enables the chain to secure itself, choose validators and nominators, reward them etc.
• Parity has ambitious goals, and values engineering excellence above all. Thus, if you are a curious engineer who looks forward to solving new problems everyday, you are looking at the right page.
• Working at Parity allows you a high degree of freedom and autonomy about how you go about achieving your goals.
• Parity has always been a remote-first company, and while you can benefit from it if you prefer, we organize frequent retreats for collaboration in various locations, including Lisbon and Berlin.

This role is very similar to both “Runtime Developer” and “Common Good Parachains”. Both of these positions are slightly more general, and in fact you will have the freedom to find your way in either of these two teams in the long term future.