Protocol Engineer

At HOPR Association we are working on a challenging and foundational infrastructure component of the web3: a decentralised and incentivised mix network that allows any two parties to exchange data without third parties knowing that they are communicating and without leaking any other metadata.

Please note: for this position, it is possible to work remotely or from our office in Zurich, Switzerland.

What you'll be creating + working on:

• Lead research and development efforts on the intersection between decentralized networks and privacy infrastructure
• Design, implement and refine the HOPR protocol. You can see the HOPR protocol at https://github.com/hoprnet
• The current version of the HOPR protocol is the bare minimal core that needs a wealth of interconnected components to make a privacy-respecting web3 stack a reality. You are expected to design and implement these layers with a growing team. Examples are overlay networks, packet retransmission, routing in a decentralized setting and dynamic resource allocation
• Support and work with the community of developers, users, investors, enthusiasts who want to use HOPR

What you bring to the team:

• Communicative team player who can work with and lead a development team in a fast-paced environment
• Desire to work on the future of privacy and trail-blaze the future of non-corporate work
• An affinity to free and open source software and community-focussed development
• Theoretical knowledge and practical experience with the internet protocol stack and protocols, minimally: IP, TCP, UDP, (QUIC,) DNS, WebRTC
• Familiarity with mixnet infrastructure and Tor along with existing limitations and issues
• Familiarity with mechanisms and common issues, minimally: proxies, NAT, firewalls, packet loss & retransmission
• Minimally 5 years hands-on development experience delivering Javascript applications in production settings

We'd be even more amazed by:

Ideally, a suitable candidate fulfils as much as possible from the following list (in order of relevance):

• Experience with libp2p
• Familiarity with elliptic curve cryptographic in theory and practice in general and pairing-based cryptography specifically
• Experience with collaborative research projects and scholarly communication
• Zero knowledge protocols such as zk-SNARKs, Bulletproofs, zk-STARKs, zk-Rollups, Optimistic Rollups
• Theoretical and practical knowledge of blockchain and crypto assets in general
• Familiarity with Ethereum and the EVM
• Motivation to communicate about your work: blogs, conferences, social media
• Experience and curiosity to work for and on a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) and decentralised governance