Backend Engineer
Silent Research Labs is a public goods organization focused on advancing web technology through cryptographic research, open source infrastructure, and ecosystem education. They support experimental applications built on novel cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge cryptography.
About Silent Research Labs
Silent Research Labs describes itself as a public goods organization improving the web. It supports ground-breaking research into experimental applications enabled by novel cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge cryptography, builds open source tools and infrastructure through transparent deployment of protocols, and drives education and ecosystem development by bringing developers, technologists, writers, and thinkers to the frontiers of decentralized application development through educational programs and community initiatives. The organization has incubated two projects, Stripchain and Silent Protocol, and is actively hiring for remote roles such as Growth Marketer, Legal Counsel, Digital Designer, Front End Developer, and Backend Engineer, emphasizing a culture of transparency, respect, remote work, and ownership-driven collaboration.
Skills
About the Role
You'll work closely with the CTO and other developers to build zero-knowledge infrastructure and products that ensure rapid growth and continued innovation. You'll have the opportunity to work on confidential and special projects while continuing to innovate in this exciting space. You'll take ownership of the product and charge of your department, architecting distributed protocols with an emphasis on security, performance, and scalability. You'll write, deploy, and test smart contracts and maintain them in production, develop best practices for protocol upgrades and versioning across networks, and collaborate with engineering, product, and design on user-facing applications. You'll mentor other engineers on Solidity and EVM topics, stay current with the latest Solidity releases and tooling, and work with the latest Zero Knowledge tooling to advance the field.
Requirements
- Minimum 4 years of professional experience in software development
- 2+ years of smart contract development including production deployments of original non-trivial protocols and related security audits
- Passion for writing concise performant and extensible code to create reliable and scalable products
- Extensive experience with Git & Github
- Extreme proficiency with Solidity and the EVM
- Experience designing distributed protocols
- Experience designing building testing deploying and maintaining high-traffic smart contracts
- Experience building and managing a protocol with significant TVL is a plus
- Ability to balance shipping quickly with building a stable infrastructure
- Strong knowledge of Node.js
- Strong expertise in JavaScript/ES6/TypeScript
- Good understanding of the HTTP stack
- Experience designing building extending and implementing APIs
- Familiarity with cloud services job queues message brokers container technologies and microservice architectures
- Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills
- Understanding of how to incrementally refactor code to continually improve a codebase while ensuring systems are designed to scale
- Strong coding practices including peer code reviews unit testing and a preference for agile development
- Strong technical and non-technical communication abilities both verbal and written
Responsibilities
- Make a HUGE impact by helping to bring ideas to reality as a core member of a lean passionate and friendly team
- Take ownership of the product and take charge of your department
- Architect and design distributed protocols with an emphasis on security performance and scalability
- Write deploy and test smart contracts and maintain them in production
- Develop and own best practices for protocol upgrades and versioning across different networks
- Collaborate with engineering product and design on user-facing applications built around smart contract protocols
- Mentor other engineers in in-depth Solidity/EVM topics and best practices
- Stay up to date with the latest Solidity releases developer tooling and exploits
- Work with the latest Zero Knowledge toolings and advance the zk field
Benefits
- Equity
- Remote work environment with competitive benefits and holidays
- 7 additional company holidays including an all-company week-long winter break
- Medical Dental and Vision Insurance for US-based employees
- Agile working environment with flexible working hours and location
- Social activities with colleagues