Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with the world's fastest, most reliable, and cost-efficient proof generation through cryptographic software and hardware codesign. We challenge conventional wisdom, simplify complexity, and execute with precision to build category-defining technology. As we continue to scale, we are looking for a talented Systems Engineer to join our Systems Engineering team in Berlin.

Role Overview

Our systems software team has a broad scope. For this reason, we are looking for experienced team players who have solid engineering fundamentals, as well as specific expertise in at least one of:

Performance optimization (Rust or C++)
Blockchain backend (Rust)
Rust

Depending on your specific profile, you may find yourself

Optimising our software stack that integrates FPGA accelerators with cryptographic application code. This involves optimal management of memory and compute resources, detailed performance profiling, as well as implementation, modification and instrumentation of cryptography code.
Orchestrating distributed proving tasks over an FPGA server cluster, working with cryptography engineers on library APIs, or integrating our stack with blockchain networks.

Necessary Qualifications

Solid computer science and computer architecture fundamentals

Bonus Qualifications

If you possess some of the qualifications below, and are curious about some of the others, we would be thrilled to hear from you:

Significant experience benchmarking, tuning and optimizing non-trivial multi-threaded software across layers of abstraction: Algorithms, concurrency, scheduling, operating system (Linux) performance tweaking, large data and memory constraints, recommendation of hardware configurations.
Significant professional Rust experience
Understanding of fundamental blockchain concepts
Understanding of cryptographic proof systems and zero-knowledge cryptography
Understanding of microservices architecture
Implementing high-performance software and distributed systems
Implementing low-level cryptographic primitives
Programming embedded processors and Linux kernel modules/drivers
Programming GPUs or FPGAs
Modifying and contributing to open-source codebases
Knowledge of AWS and/or Google Cloud, as well as of computer security principles

Locations supported:

We’re looking for candidates who are located between the USA East Coast and Central Europe time zones.

We are also in the process of opening an office in Berlin, and are excited to support relocation, on a case by case basis. Once our office is open, we plan to bring the whole company together for ~one week per quarter in Berlin.

We have a globally distributed company, and ensuring the team works in a cohesive way is our main goal.

About us:

We're building out a high-performance, cost-efficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs. Verifiable computing with zk-SNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that today's blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zk-SNARKs to prove smart contract executions, such as Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync, are already in production. We believe there is a big market opportunity to generate proofs for these networks at scale in a cost-effective way [1]. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput.

We take the approach of co-designing hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation end-to-end. Our first-generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case [2].

We also conduct cryptography research to identify computationally efficient algorithms for verifiable computing. These research efforts produced a novel cryptographic construction based on towers of binary fields called Binius [3] [4], which we are currently developing into a production-grade system.

Our team has cross-domain expertise and includes hardware designers, low-level systems software engineers, cryptography engineers, and data center specialists, several of whom worked in HFT previously.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where talented individuals can thrive and grow. We value the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that each person brings to our team. Even if you don't fit 100% of the job's necessary qualifications, we'd still love to hear from you.

To all recruitment agencies: Irreducible does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Irreducible employees, or any other organisation location. Irreducible is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please read our full policy here.

Systems Engineer