Senior Rust Engineer – Interchain Stack

Senior Blockchain Engineer (Rust) – Interchain Stack

Type: Full Time

Location: Remote (US, Canada, Europe)

Team: Interchain

About Informal

Informal Systems is a remote-first company with offices in Toronto, Lausanne, Vienna and Berlin. We are structured like a worker’s cooperative, where important corporate actions are subject to one-person-one-vote democratic control by the member-employees. We provide 5-weeks of paid vacation, lifestyle benefits, and annual retreats with the whole team.

We envision a sustainable future of cooperatively owned and governed, open-source, distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems and are excited to grow the team with amazing individuals who believe in making this future a reality.

Informal is a core contributor to Cosmos, where we develop interoperable blockchain systems by heavily relying on formal verification tools and techniques (formal specification in TLA+, symbolic model checker Apalache, Model-Based Testing Framework, etc.).

The Cosmos technology stack, including CometBFT, the Cosmos-SDK, IBC, and the Cosmos Proof of Stake modules, is an industry-leading toolkit for building, deploying, and running community-owned decentralized networks. 

However, many of these components were designed in 2016, back when the Cosmos vision of an “Internet of Sovereign, Interoperable Blockchains” was but a dream. Today, it is rapidly becoming a reality, and with it, a new set of requirements and tremendous learnings about the technology stack necessary for the next 5 years. We are building this stack in Rust, including many of the key components of the Cosmos ecosystem, but designed more natively for a multi-chain reality. This includes IBC-rs, thee leading implementation of IBC protocol in Rust for enabling inter-blockchain communications, Hermes, the leading IBC relayer for communication between blockchains, as well as a new multi-chain consensus node based on Tendermint and a new framework for developing secure and verifiable applications in Rust.

About the Role

As a Rust engineer in the Informal’s Interchain unit, you will have a substantial impact on the success of the IBC products developed in Informal Systems. You will also influence the team’s culture and processes. You will operate product-first, going where the user problems are, and approach engineering tasks with resourcefulness, creativity, and swiftness. Taking ownership of tasks, working well in tight-knit squads, and adapting to ambiguous requirements that evolve rapidly are essential skills for success. You will have the opportunity to explore advanced Rust programming techniques, and learn a new programming paradigm called context-generic programming. The Interchain unit in Informal Systems has deep expertise in distributed systems, formal methods, blockchain protocols, and product engineering.

What your primary responsibilities will be:

• Design, develop and maintain Rust implementations for various IBC standards
• Drive the expansion of the IBC standards, integration with various ecosystems
• Improve the user experience, correctness, code quality, and performance of the software.
• Contribute clean, well-tested, and well-documented code.
• Review issues and pull requests and provide valuable feedback to contributors.
• Guard the quality of the software from technical debt, missing tests or documentation, and feature creep.
• Nurture a safe and enjoyable open-source experience for contributors.

What we look for in a successful Rust Engineer:

• At least 3 years of developing, releasing, and maintaining production software.
• Significant experience writing Rust or the ability and desire to become proficient in new languages and programming paradigms.
• Familiarity with functional programming paradigms and type systems.
• A track record of designing maintainable APIs that are a delight to use.
• Experience with networking protocols, blockchain application development, cross-chain communication solutions or other related technologies.
• Experience with different serialization schemes, cryptographic primitives, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, or other related tools.
• A deep understanding of computer science fundamentals.
• The ability to take ownership and see initiatives through.
• Commitment to product quality, user experience, and well-structured code.
• Excellent interpersonal skills, experience working with distributed teams, and enjoys working with and mentoring others.

Some of our benefits include:

• A unique, caring and friendly culture (learn more about how we work here)
• 25 days (5 weeks) of paid vacation annually, plus 3 Spiritual Days
• Company closure from December 25th to January 1
• Annual Lifestyle benefits (reimbursements for gym memberships, fitness equipment, etc)
• A remote-first, flexible work environment
• A home-office stipend to set you up for success
• Annual company retreats
• Paid parental leave
• ….. and many more!

We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity in our organization. We are committed to equal employment opportunities and encourage applications from people of all race, religion, colour, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.