Come join Irreducible as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with reliable and cost-efficient proof generation. We’re a high-performance cryptography startup (with an exciting hardware twist) looking for a talented Systems Software Engineer. A more technical description of what we do is below!

About the role:

As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Ulvetanna, you will develop systems for deploying software and firmware images to our bare metal server cluster and help manage our software development environments. Our production infrastructure includes connected FPGA-based high-performance compute servers, monitoring and logging services, blockchain network nodes, and API gateways, spanning both a bare-metal deployment and public cloud environments like AWS and GCP.

Infrastructure team members work closely with the hardware engineers and systems software engineers to specify the production requirements and build tools to empower the team to ship code to production securely, efficiently, and with full confidence and transparency.

Being a self-starter is essential, as there are always a variety of challenges that need to be tackled. Your work will have a direct impact on our growth and success.

Locations supported:

We’re looking for candidates who are located between the USA East Coast and Central Europe time zones.

We are also in the process of opening an office in Berlin, and are excited to support relocation, on a case by case basis. Once our office is open, we plan to bring the whole company together for ~one week per quarter in Berlin.

We have a globally distributed company, and ensuring the team works in a cohesive way is our main goal.

Necessary Qualifications:

• Experienced and well-versed in Linux, version control, scripting, and build systems

• Experience developing reproducible software build configurations

• Familiarity with blockchain network nodes and fundamental concepts

• Understanding of computer architecture and configuration

• Strong knowledge of Python, Go, or Rust

• A deep passion for technology, software development, and secure computing

• Demonstrated ability to deliver software projects from inception to completion in a fast-pace environment

• Ability to think across layers of abstractions

• Understanding of technology tradeoffs and a pragmatic approach to problem solving

• Strong written and verbal communications skills

Bonus Qualifications:

• Experience modifying and contributing to open-source codebases

• Experience implementing high-performance software and distributed systems

• Understanding of computer security principles

• Understanding of virtualization

• Experience working with:

  • Virtualization tools like Docker and Qemu

  • Hardware accelerators

  • Embedded system firmware builds

  • Server deployments using network booting

  • Devops tools like Terraform and Ansible

• Knowledge of Rust

• Knowledge of AWS and/or GCP

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.

Know someone who could be a fit? Feel free to pass along a link to the role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/irreducible/ee7001ba-f905-4b82-b737-613d3dc7bce3