Research Cryptographer & Mathematician
Heliax is a public goods lab that creates, researches, and builds open-source protocols and mechanisms designed to serve humanity's everyday needs. They focus on developing privacy-preserving systems and empowering individual sovereignty, with projects in cryptography, distributed systems, and programming languages.
About Heliax
Heliax is a public goods lab composed of creators, researchers, and builders focused on deploying open-source protocols and mechanisms. They aim to create alternatives to existing exploitative paradigms by constructing technology that empowers individual sovereignty and privacy. The company is vertically integrated, handling everything from research to product development. Their work is founded on experience in distributed systems, programming language theory, and zero-knowledge cryptography. They have contributed to layer-1 protocols like Cosmos and Tezos and designed cross-chain communication protocols such as IBC. Their projects include Anoma, a privacy-preserving protocol for decentralized counterparty discovery, and various cryptography and programming language tools like MASP, Juvix, and Typhon.
Skills
About the Role
You will design, evaluate, and implement cryptographic protocols and primitives. You will create and analyze zero-knowledge proof constructions such as zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs, and work on threshold encryption, distributed key generation, elliptic curves, hash functions, and multi-party protocols. You will produce comprehensive technical specifications, implement and test cryptographic operations primarily in Rust, and review existing implementations for correctness and performance. You will customize and combine protocols for proofs-of-concept and production use-cases and collaborate with engineers on bringing specifications into working implementations.
Requirements
- Mathematical and/or cryptographic background in complexity theory, abstract algebra, and cryptographic protocol design
- Expertise in constructive protocol design and analysis of distributed cryptographic protocols
- Design or implementation experience of a protocol (research paper, experimental project, past work project, or detailed write-ups)
- Proficiency in Rust for implementing and testing cryptographic code
- Must be based in Europe (including UK) and willing to travel to Berlin for initial onboarding
Responsibilities
- Design new cryptographic protocols from first principles
- Evaluate and analyze existing cryptographic protocols such as zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs for security, expressivity, and performance
- Update, alter, reimplement, and combine existing cryptographic protocols for specific proofs-of-concept and production use-cases
- Produce comprehensive technical specifications for designs and instantiations of cryptographic protocols
- Implement, review, and test cryptographic operations and protocols primarily in Rust
- Collaborate with engineers on implementations of cryptographic protocols
Benefits
- Remote-first work
- Relocation assistance and visa support