Zero Knowledge (ZK) Jobs

MobileCoinis building the future of private, secure, and usable digital payments. We want to make a privacy-focused cryptocurrency you can use everyday to pay for anything.

We are passionate about researching, prototyping, and implementing mathematical methods to explore, isolate, and solve problems in the global financial markets while respecting user-privacy. We believe that career fulfillment and enterprise success converge when smart, hard-working, and intellectually curious people come together with a shared goal of innovation, and the pursuit of excellence.

Your Role

The Cryptographer will join MobileCoin’s Research team focusing on state-of-the-art research in zero-knowledge proving systems, reapplying existing circuit arithmetization techniques to current systems, searching for real-world optimizations, and investigating potential new proving systems. You will work closely with a small team of other researchers as we delve into revising the currency's current design to support new features, such as smart contracts, multiparty transactions, escrow services, Layer 2 protocols, selective ledger transparency, decentralized exchanges, synthetic assets, and more, all while maintaining our strong commitment to user-privacy and usability. A variety of backgrounds are welcome, from embedded systems and hardware focused cryptographic designers, to those with experience in formal verification and writing and modeling for security proofs, to best practices in making robust, misuse-resistant, production-quality cryptographic implementations. This is a rare opportunity for an applied cryptographer to holistically design a real-world, more private, more efficient system from the ground up, everything from low-level hardware optimization to maths to high-level user and developer interfaces and APIs.

Responsibilities

• Research and design replacement technologies to enhance the security, speed, privacy, and usability of our current protocol

• Investigate and prototype cryptographic primitives to allow additional future functionality

• Document and share research findings with a small team

• Review and audit existing cryptographic code and write arguments of security

Required Skills, Qualifications and Experience

• Experience in auditing and reviewing cryptographic designs

• Working knowledge of Rust, modern C++, C or another systems language

• Background in contributing to privacy-focused projects

• Strong programming skills in Sage, Python, or other scripting languages, used for rapid prototyping and building proofs-of-concept

• Hands-on mentality, attention to detail, and keen interest in cryptography

• 5+ years of industry or academic experience in cryptographic systems design

• Ability to write thorough documentation, both for research papers and code

• Ability to communicate effectively on technical and mathematical subjects with other experts

Preferred Skills, Qualifications and Experience

• Experience in building or optimizing low-level algorithms, such as optimizing elliptic curve designs, or writing constant-time primitives

• Academic background in mathematics, cryptography, or computer science

• Background with formal verification and/or proof-driven development systems such as Coq, TLA+, Cryptol, etc.

• Experience in building data, research or production tools for privacy preserving products

• Experience with low-level implementations utilizing hardware devices such as SGX, HSMs, common embedded microarchitectures, and GPUs

• Experience authoring and porting cryptographically-sensitive code

Employment Type: Full-Time or Contract