Senior Cryptographer
- Aztec
Job Description
About Aztec
At Aztec, our goal is to take the original promise of Ethereum–a decentralized and verifiable world computer–and expand its capability immensely by making it fully encrypted.
In the current public blockchain paradigm, users and entities unknowingly broadcast data in the public, compromising privacy and security to get trustlessness.
Not only are unencrypted blockchains inherently privacy-exposing, they require significant redundancy to compute and verify the legitimacy of transactions.
Implementing scalable encryption in a public blockchain paradigm requires cutting-edge math and engineering. Thankfully, our team of scientists and engineers invented Plonk, the industry-standard zkSNARK, and Noir, the universal language of zero knowledge.
Now, we’re building a first of its kind public-private encrypted blockchain: Ethereum, encrypted. And it’s now time to bring it to market.
We’ve raised $125 million from industry-leading investors including a16z crypto, Paradigm, Variant, Consensys, and a_capital, and we’re growing quickly.
Team and Responsibilities
We’re creating a general-purpose private smart contract layer for Ethereum, affectionately dubbed ‘Aztec 3’.
We utilise bleeding-edge cryptography in our tech stack to realise private transactions on a public blockchain network, particularly in the realm of zero-knowledge cryptography.
As a result we possess a world-class R&D team that has co-authored the Plonk and Plookup ZK-SNARK protocols. Plonk in particular is rapidly becoming an industry standard ZK-SNARK technology.
We are looking for experienced cryptographers to expand our R&D team and allow us to further enhance the state-of-the-art when it comes to generating proofs of private computation.
Role focus
- Research techniques to improve both the constant and asymptotic performance of our cryptographic protocols
- Perform literature reviews to identify new developments that could improve the Prover/Verifier efficiency of our cryptographic protocols (or replace them entirely)
- Develop security proofs for our ZK-SNARK circuit architectures
- Liaise with our applied cryptographers to assist them with implementing our cryptographic protocols in software
Required experience
- PhD-level qualification in cryptography or a related field
- 6+ combined years of experience in post-PhD cryptographic research in academia and/or industry
- Lead author in one or more papers in the field of zero-knowledge cryptography
- Familiarity with algorithms, data structures and basic programming concepts
- Ability to read and understand software implementations of cryptographic protocols written in C++
- A penchant for clear and comprehensive documentation
- Able to provide clear and constructive feedback for more junior cryptographers / applied cryptographers, mentoring where necessary
- A passion for blockchain, its potential, and what we’re trying to achieve.
What we offer:
- Flexible and remote work environment
- 25 days holiday + bank holidays annually
- Additional benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, and opportunities for professional development.
- Quarterly offsite travel for collaboration
- Events and conference budget
- An opportunity to work at the cutting edge of blockchain and FinTech with a world class cryptography and engineering team
Apply Now
About Aztec
At Aztec we believe privacy isn’t just a fundamental right, but a creative force for web3. Our goal is to unleash the full potential of decentralized technologies by building an open, privacy-first network with no compromises.
Privacy enables use cases that otherwise would not be possible and accelerates mainstream adoption. The next wave of web3 applications will require programmable privacy. Aztec’s technology empowers developers with the tools to build private applications and bring their ideas to reality.
Our journey started while building an application to bring syndicated loans on chain. We realized that our idea was a nonstarter without privacy. There were no solutions to offer privacy on public blockchains - so we sought out to build it ourselves. Since then, we've made industry-leading advances in cryptography, and deployed a private money platform and a private DeFi platform.
To realize our vision of implementing privacy on a public blockchain, we are building a world-class team of cryptographers, engineers, and ecosystem builders. Supporting us on this journey are leading investors including Paradigm, Variant, Consensys, and a_capital.