Research Scientist, Cryptography

Protocol Labs, Remote

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Seeking an experienced cryptographer to help us research and develop state of the art cryptosystems to upgrade the internet.

Research at Protocol Labs

This isn't an ordinary Research Scientist position. Your expertise is mostly driven by both a hunger to learn and a need to work toward solving important problems. Our research scientists are granted both the freedom to develop their knowledge by working on novel applications, and a responsibility to contribute those skills toward advancing the flagship projects of Protocol Labs. You’ll feel at home working with us if your knowledge and optimism enables you to name a few unusual possible approaches when you’re first presented with a problem that people often consider intractable.

We see cryptography often acting as the last line of defense in a world that’s rife with malicious actors. We examine a broad spectrum of potential projects, like Filecoin, that rely on providing various cryptographic guarantees to users. Achieving these guarantees in practice often requires drawing from or advancing the frontiers of cryptographic protocols. As a result, we seek cryptographers who can discover, conceive of, incorporate, and implement new techniques.

As Research Scientist at Protocol Labs you will…

Participate in cutting-edge research in cryptography and blockchain technology
Develop novel systems and protocols while studying and learning from existing ones
Work with the development team on turning the research into implementations
Work with external teams to oversee development and maintenance of cryptographic libraries

You may be a fit for this role if you have...

MS or PhD degree in Computer Science or Math with an emphasis on developing and implementing cryptographic protocols, or equivalent practical experience.
Experience contributing to research communities and/or efforts, including publishing papers at conferences.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Bonus Points

You have a record of demonstrating state-of-the-art innovation in cryptography with a proven publication record or project history. Potentially including but not limited to authenticated data structures, elliptic curve pairings, authenticated encryption, graph traversals, pebblings games, and zero knowledge proofs.
You’ve implemented novel crypto and would feel comfortable overseeing others doing the same.
You believe that if you can’t explain something to a six-year-old, then you don’t understand it yourself, and your experience mentoring or writing technical explainers or blog posts demonstrates that you enjoy testing your understanding against this metric.
You have programming experience and proficiency in one or more of the following: Go, Rust, JavaScript, C, C++, Haskell, OCaml.
You’ve demonstrated the ability to design and execute on research agenda.
You have experience setting up or managing research collaborations or contractors.
You have dice specifically for generating hand-crafted, artisanal entropy.

What’s it like to work at Protocol Labs?

Protocol Labs mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more.

As a distributed team, we hire anywhere in the world, and at various levels of experience (entry, senior, staff). We look for people with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds.

We have a great benefits package, including parental leave, contributions to your retirement, competitive pay, and unlimited time off. For U.S.-based employees, we also provide platinum-level health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.

About Protocol Labs

Company Protocol Labs is a research, development, and deployment lab for network protocols. Protocol Labs leads groundbreaking internet projects, such as IPFS, the decentralized web protocol; Filecoin, a cryptocurrency incentivized storage network; and libp2p, a modular network stack for peer-to-peer apps and systems. Protocol Labs works openly, and is focused on the creation of value at a massive scale. Open Source Protocol Labs works on a growing number of Open Source projects. The major technology stacks we produce are developed entirely Open Source, from initial research, through implementation development, and into wide deployment. The communities we lead are open, welcoming, and inclusive. We invite you to get involved; join us on GitHub! History Protocol Labs was founded on May 2014, by Juan Benet, inventor of IPFS and Filecoin. That summer, we participated in the YCombinator program (S14). Protocol Labs released IPFS to the world in January 2015. Since then, IPFS has gained enormous traction in a variety of industries and organizations. By 2016, IPFS grew to be one of the most used and relied on technologies in the Blockchain industry, and hailed by thousands of developers as "The Future of the Web." That year, Protocol Labs also created libp2p, IPLD, multiformats, Orbit, and a number of other projects. Our most anticipated project is Filecoin, currently in development.