Who are we?

Vacbuildspublic good protocols for the decentralized web.

We do applied research based on which we build protocols, libraries and publications. Custodians of protocols that reflect a set of principles - liberty, privacy, etc.

You can see a sample of some of our work here: Vac, Waku v2 and Ethereum Messaging, Privacy-preserving p2p economic spam protection in Waku v2, Waku v2 RFC. Our attitude towards ZK: Vac <3 ZK.

The role?

This role will be part of Vac’s Secure Messaging (SeM) team. We research and design modular p2p protocols for scaling, secure, private, anonymous, and censorship-resistant communications. The main focus is Waku, the communication layer for Web3.

Key responsibilities 

• Research and develop open P2P protocols for secure messaging.
• Build incentivized, distributed systems.
• Research incentives for nodes to provide resources and/or offer services in P2P protocols.
• Use a layered protocol approach that is mindful and explicit about what it requires, what it provides, under what threat models, and with what trade-offs.
• Combine cryptoeconomics and traditional technologies to create a sustainable, scalable, distributed, and fault-tolerant system.
• Use libp2p to build application-level protocols.
• Interpret and implement solutions based on academic research.
• Provide feedback on overall design decisions, and participate in code reviews.
• Write Nim code

You ideally will have 

• A passion for blockchain technology, privacy-preserving technology and decentralization.
• A strong academic background.
• Experience with token economics.
• Experience with protocol incentivization.
• Experience designing incentive systems and writing/deploying smart contracts in Ethereum.
• Experience with game theory.
• Experience with low level/strongly typed languages (C/C++/Go/Rust).
• Experience building networking-heavy applications and p2p networking specifically.
• Familiarity with message propagation in loosely connected networks.
• Familiar with p2p building blocks such as gossiping, routing and discovery (DHTs), and Nat traversal.
• A Master’s degree in Computer Science with a focus on computer networks.
• A strong alignment to our principles: https://status.im/about/#our-principles

Bonus points if 

• A PhD degree in an area related to computer networks.
• Contributed to a blockchain-related, open source project.
• In in the Ethereum community.
• Experience with cryptography such as OTR, X3DH, Noise protocol.
• Experience with Nim.
• Experience with off-the-shelf networking stacks such as libp2p / devp2p

[Don’t worry if you don’t meet all of these criteria, we’d still love to hear from you anyway if you think you’d be a great fit for this role. Just explain to us why in your cover letter].

Compensation

We pay a competitive salary based on experience, plus a grant of Status Network Tokens vesting over a three-year period. More info on SNT here here: https://status.im/snt-utility/

Hiring process

The hiring process for this role will be:

1. Interview with Angel from our Talent team
2. Interview with team member from the Vac team
3. Pair programming task with the Vac team
4. Interview with Oskar, the 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.