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
Build zero-knowledge infrastructure and products across distributed protocol architecture, smart contracts, protocol upgrades, and user-facing applications. Write, deploy, test, and maintain smart contracts, develop protocol best practices, mentor engineers on Solidity and EVM topics, and advance zero-knowledge tooling.
Requirements
- Minimum 4 years of professional software development experience
- 2+ years of smart contract development experience, including production deployments of original, non-trivial protocols and related security audits
- Extensive experience with Git and GitHub
- Extreme proficiency with Solidity and the EVM
- Experience designing distributed protocols
- Experience designing, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining high-traffic smart contracts
- Strong knowledge of Node.js
- Strong expertise in JavaScript, ES6, and 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
- Experience with peer code reviews and unit testing
- Strong technical and non-technical communication abilities
- Experience implementing complex math in Solidity is a bonus
- Experience with React and Redux is a bonus
- Experience with CI/CD systems is a bonus
- Experience extracting, transforming, and loading blockchain transaction data is a bonus
- Experience writing ETL processes is a bonus
Responsibilities
- Architect and design distributed protocols with emphasis on security, performance, and scalability
- Write, deploy, test, and maintain smart contracts in production
- Develop best practices for protocol upgrades and versioning across networks
- Collaborate with engineering, product, and design on user-facing applications
- Mentor engineers on Solidity and EVM topics and best practices
- Stay up to date with Solidity releases, developer tooling, and exploits
- Work with zero-knowledge tooling and advance the zero-knowledge field
Benefits
- Remote work environment
- Competitive benefits and holidays
- Seven additional company holidays
- Medical insurance for US-based employees
- Dental insurance for US-based employees
- Vision insurance for US-based employees
- Flexible working hours and location
- Social activities
