Protocol Engineer

The project:

https://free.technology/codex 

Codex is looking for a protocol engineer to join our team of talented engineers and researchers in shaping the future of decentralized storage. Our product leverages cutting-edge Zero Knowledge and erasures coding techniques with peer-to-peer and blockchain technologies to provide a decentralized, secure, and efficient solution while providing novel data durability guarantees.

For this role, you will work within the p2p client team and collaborate with our researchers and engineers to develop, test, and maintain our protocols and our p2p client. This role sits at the heart of our efforts: networking protocols are one of main tenets upon which our system is built, and making sure they are scalable, secure, and efficient while meeting the needs of our product will be your main concern.

Responsibilities:

• Understanding our existing peer-to-peer protocols for overlay maintenance and data transfer (e.g. DHT and our block exchange protocols) using both documentation and code;
• Helping us identify and fix correctness, performance, and security bugs, which includes developing new and custom tooling when required;
• Helping us shape and develop a principled testing approach for Codex, which includes defining sensible workloads and network models, as well as implementing those in our testbed;
• Developing new protocols to support new features;
• Performing the basic duties of a software engineer: striving for quality, improving testability, and helping us produce and maintain a culture of engineering excellence in our team. 

You have: 

• Strong knowledge of decentralized and peer-to-peer systems and how they operate. You have acquired that knowledge either through a degree, like a PhD in the field, or through equivalent experience in industry - perhaps even both;
• Contributed to Open Source and ideally have made significant contributions in the past;
• Experience working with a programming language in a budding ecosystem and all the opportunities and challenges that this brings; 
• Experience in a statically typed system programming languages (e.g. Rust, C/C++, or Go);
• Good communication skills. We are a fully remote and asynchronous team, and being willing and able to communicate what you are working on and what issues you might be facing with the rest of the team is of the essence. You also feel comfortable publicly discussing your work in talks, blog posts, and/or academic papers. You can distil complex problems into explanations people can understand;
• Experience debugging difficult issues is par for the course, and are willing to roll up your sleeves and put extensive effort into isolating and squashing them.

Bonus points if you:

• Have previous experience with decentralized storage networks (DSNs), or are at least acquainted with this space; 
• Can work with networking protocols from simulation/formal verification down to implementation;
• Are familiar with compact and Zero-Knowledge proofs and their workings. 

Hiring process:

1. Intro call with People Ops team
2. Interview with Codex team member
3. (Paid) Task
4. Interview with Codex team member
5. Interview with Project Lead

Compensation:

The expected compensation range for this role is negotiable, dependent on how we assess your skills and experience throughout our interview process). We are happy to pay in any mix of fiat/crypto.