Software Engineer JD · Apply Here

The platonic ideal candidate:

• Has 2+ years experience with the full-stack software product development process: seeing a feature through to the end, from spec-ing a feature based on system design / product requirements, implementing it, testing it, shipping it into production, maintaining it and continuing to improve it based off of either user feedback or additional requirements.
• Has 2+ years experience working effectively on a software team, and has strong relevant collaboration skills like: engaging in the code review process, participating in planning processes, communicating verbally and in writing, engaging with teammates respectfully and assuming good faith, handling disagreements.
• Has experience working with TypeScript, React, Postgres, and other web technologies.
• Has an “ownership mindset” - accountable to their commitments and decisions.
• Has a “growth mindset” - the desire and ability to become more effective across many domains over time.
• Is positive and optimistic. We are working to make speculative, early-stage technologies a reality - PCD Team is a bet on the future.
• Is capable of taking underspecified descriptions and fleshing them out fully. Candidates should be detail-oriented and consider all aspects of a problem, including tradeoffs and edge cases.
• Has determination and patience. Given a difficult problem, has the grit to push through the complexity and deliver a solution that solves the problem effectively. The ideal candidate gets to the bottom of things.
• Is practical and pragmatic. They are willing to make deliberate tradeoffs in a constrained environment where the goal is to ship. This goes hand in hand with being able to work effectively amidst uncertainty and ambiguity, as this is a speculative and very early-stage team that moves very quickly.
• Desires to engage with and serve 3rd-party developers and make their lives easier

The perks of this job are that the candidate would:

• Help develop technology the world has never seen.
• Gain exposure to bleeding-edge cryptography and make it accessible to a generalist developer audience.
  • Note that you do not need background in cryptography to contribute to PCD Team: our work is focused on abstracting away new cryptographic primitives, packaging them up and making them accessible for others.
• Be a part of a rapidly-advancing industry of applied cryptography. For context, ZK performance has improved by an order of magnitude YoY for the past four years. You can read more about that here.
• Travel around the world for 3mo+ per year to meet with and work with different developer and user communities that our technology serves or interacts with.
  • In the past year, 0xPARC has traveled to Bogota, Colombia; Boston, USA; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Zuzalu, Montenegro, to run programs alongside Ethereum Foundation, MIT, Privacy and Scaling Explorations, and Zuzalu.
• Work within a team and community of highly motivated and effective people, including some of the foremost experts in applications of zkSNARKs. 0xPARC members have built:
  • The first ZK-powered game (https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest)
  • The first production ZK machine learning tooling (https://github.com/zkonduit/ezkl)
  • The first ZK data exchange protocols (https://github.com/factorgroup/nightmarket)
  • The first ZK-based identity systems used in-person (https://zupass.org/)
  • The first concrete applications of recursive zk-SNARKs (https://ethdos.xyz/blog)
  • … and more!
• Work with technologies where you can't stack overflow the answer. You will be faced with difficult problems that no one else has encountered before, and you will have to solve them.
• Be part of a small team, and, yes: wear many hats
• Rapidly ship code to production that affects real users and developers
• Be a part of a highly mission-driven movement that is innovating both technologically and organizationally.
  • PCD Team is part of 0xPARC, a unique collective of teams pushing the boundary on what is possible with applied cryptography, 100% funded by grants. 0xPARC teams fully own our own agendas and destinies, without traditional pressures from external investors.