Protocol & Infrastructure Engineer

About Heliax

The systems of coordination and finance in our world today are not private or resilient enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a protocol engineer interested in helping us quickly, safely, and performantly implement the shielded asset hub Namada. As a member of the Namada engineering team, you will be working on distributed ledger technology implemented in Rust, all the way up and down the stack from the P2P layer to consensus algorithms, transaction execution systems, and privacy-enhancing cryptographic components. This role also comes with a focus on infrastructure: automated testing, SDKs, integrations, testnets, and similar.

This role offers the chance to work closely with experts and researchers in various domains. From cryptography to distributed systems research, a good sample of the work we do can be found on our Anoma Research Topics page, and the primary codebase can be found at github.com/anoma/namada.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain protocol-associated infrastructure, including CI/CD pipelines, private and public testnets, internal test tooling, and similar.
• Produce technical specifications of distributed ledger protocols or protocol upgrades in coordination with other team members
• Implement protocols in performant and cleanly abstracted Rust code
• Comprehensively document and test protocols and protocol changes
• Benchmark implementations and adjust both high-level architecture and low-level details in order to optimise for performance while retaining semantic correctness
• Conduct code reviews in coordination with other team members and help maintain a high standard of quality across the codebase

Qualifications

• Prior experience with systems programming in Rust
• Experience with AWS, Docker, Terraform and other similar infra
• Self-motivated & self-organized
• Interested in open-source technology and research applied to DLT
• Ability to work independently and reliably without extensive supervision.
• Good communication and collaboration skills; experience working with both engineers and researchers.
• Ability to regularly join meetings in evening European time (e.g. 14-19 CET).

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, network/systems engineering, operating systems engineering, cryptography engineering, blockchain technology, and/or database system design and optimization.
• Industry experience in bringing systems to production.

Misc



• Must be willing to travel to Europe for initial onboarding, and several times a year for team retreats (these costs are covered by Heliax).
• Ideally someone who enjoys travel, nature, and hiking. Often we find that protocols are best designed not in a meeting room but rather on a trail.