Software Engineer

About Aztec

At Aztec, our goal is to add privacy to Ethereum.

In the current public blockchain paradigm, users and entities unknowingly broadcast data in the public, compromising privacy and security to get trustlessness.

Not only are unencrypted blockchains inherently privacy-exposing, they require significant redundancy to compute and verify the legitimacy of transactions.

Implementing scalable encryption in a public blockchain paradigm requires cutting-edge math and engineering. Thankfully, our team of scientists and engineers invented Plonk, the industry-standard zkSNARK, and Noir, the universal language of zero knowledge.

Now, we’re building a first of its kind Layer 2 with private smart contracts. This requires new cryptographic primitives, a zero-knowledge DSL for writing contracts, a privacy-friendly execution environment, a carefully designed set of circuits that prove the validity of the chain to L1, a decentralized block-building and proving mechanism, and a top-tier user and developer experience. And it’s now time to bring it to market.

We’ve raised $125 million from industry-leading investors including a16z crypto, Paradigm, Variant, Consensys, and a_capital, and we’re growing quickly.

Role focus:

We're looking for entrepreneurial thinkers that are interested in tackling new problems working across codebases to:

• Understand the full system architecture end to end
• Prioritize and document technical debt and unnecessary complexity within the system
• Implement solutions and improvements for key stakeholders
• Refactor code, improving readability, documentation, maintainability and unit testing
• Influence and enhance current engineering bar

In particular, some of the tasks you could be working on include:

• Designing efficient solutions to cryptographic problems in Noir
• Implementing and optimizing cryptographic libraries in Noir
• Providing feedback on/implementing necessary compiler optimizations for the above
• Advising and reviewing cryptographic contributions from the community
• Implementing and optimizing Noir’s interfacing layer with cryptographic proving backends

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in related technical field
• 3+ years of Rust engineering experience
• 1+ year of cryptography engineering experience
• A penchant for clear and comprehensive documentation
• Able to provide clear and constructive feedback on less senior engineers’ PRs, mentoring where necessary

Nice-to-have experience:

• Located in the UK or can operate in Greenwich Mean Time Zone
• Familiarity with other ZK languages
• Passion for the web3 space
• Compiler experience
• C++ experience

What we offer:

• Flexible and remote work environment
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays annually
• Additional benefits include health insurance, retirement plans, and opportunities for professional development.
• Quarterly offsite travel for collaboration
• Events and conference budget
• An opportunity to work at the cutting edge of blockchain and FinTech with a world class cryptography and engineering team

Aztec Labs is an equal opportunity employer and we value creativity, diversity, and intellectual curiosity. If you're passionate about leveraging your creative talents to make a real-world impact, and if you want to be part of a team that's shaping the future of digital privacy, then we would love to hear from you.