Engineering Manager

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 Systems Engineer to join our Systems Engineering team in Berlin.

Role Overview

As the Engineering Manager of Irreducible’s Cryptography Team, you'll lead a talented group of engineers dedicated to making Binius the leading open-source library for verifiable computing. Your team’s mission is to deliver high-performance, secure, and developer-friendly cryptographic solutions, positioning Binius as the preferred choice for zero-knowledge applications.

You'll be responsible for both people and project management, collaborating closely with the CTO—who serves as the product technical lead—to prioritize development efforts, allocate resources, and ensure timely delivery. Your role involves coordination with the cryptography research team to seamlessly transition theoretical innovations into robust, practical solutions.

Role Location

• This role is based in Berlin. You must be located there, or open to relocation, and open to coming to our Mitte, Berlin office ~3 days per week.

• 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.

• You’ll need to be in the office three days per week, in addition to more on “as needed” basis. For example, if we have a week-long company offsite, you’ll need to be in the office the entire time.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of 5-10 engineers, mostly senior-level, fostering a high-performing, collaborative culture.

• Manage the delivery of cryptographic protocols and algorithm implementations designed by the research team, ensuring a focus on performance optimization, security, and simplicity.

• Oversee efforts aimed at low-level software performance improvements leveraging Rust and other optimization techniques.

• Ensure an excellent developer experience for external teams integrating Binius into their applications and virtual machines.

• Facilitate collaboration with systems software and hardware engineering teams to integrate and enhance our hardware-accelerated proving stack.

• Ensure technical documentation clearly communicates complex cryptographic concepts and is maintained at a high standard.

• Lead hiring initiatives to actively grow the team in alignment with strategic goals.

Necessary Qualifications

• Proven experience managing high-velocity engineering teams (at least 5 engineers) focused on deep technology areas such as cryptography, AI, quantum computing, robotics, etc.

• Prior experience as a staff-level engineer or equivalent.

• A degree in computer science, engineering, applied mathematics, or a related field.

• Demonstrated organizational skills and adaptability in fast-paced environments.

• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts in writing.

• Previous experience working effectively within remote or hybrid remote team structures.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience in an early-stage startup environment (20-40 employees).

• Familiarity with cryptographic principles, especially zero-knowledge cryptography.

• Previous contributions to or maintenance of open-source software projects.

• Hands-on programming experience in Rust.

About Us (deep dive)...

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.

To all recruitment agencies: Irreducible does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Irreducible employees, or any other organisation location. Irreducible is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please read our full policy here.