Full Stack Engineer (Aztec 3)

About Aztec

At Aztec, our goal is to take the original promise of Ethereum–a decentralized and verifiable world computer–and expand its capability immensely by making it fully encrypted. 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 public-private encrypted blockchain: Ethereum, encrypted. 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 creating a general-purpose private smart contract layer for Ethereum, affectionately dubbed ‘Aztec 3’. We’re now looking for a full-stack engineer to help build out Aztec 3. Think of the best software and tooling in the Ethereum ecosystem today. The successful candidate will help build private equivalents of it all! That is, software which allows: developers to build and deploy private smart contracts; users to privately interact with them; and rollup providers to keep the network running smoothly.

• Building a ‘full node’, in TypeScript, which:
• Rolls-up private smart contract transactions, making use of our recursive zk-SNARK cryptography library;
• Reliably syncs with the Aztec Network’s L1 & L2 states;
• Allows private and secure execution of users’ smart contract transactions;
• Manages sensitive user data securely;
• Interfaces neatly with developers’ apps;
• Allows p2p relaying of transactions across the network;
• Has a ‘test’ mode, which enables testing of complex private smart contract interactions.
• Building a TypeScript ‘wrapper’ module that allows developers to easily build apps which can interface with the above full node and with our custom Noir language’s suite of tools.
• Building complex example applications to test and demonstrate Aztec 3’s capabilities.
• Liaise with the cryptography team, to ensure our cryptography library exposes everything the full node will need.
• Liaise with our Noir language team, to ensure our custom private smart contract programming language provides an intuitive experience for our target audience of developers.
• Liaise with our business team, to ensure Aztec 3 delivers what the ecosystem needs.

Required experience

• Knowledge of algorithms, data structures, systems level programming, etc
• 3+ years solid engineering experience in web3 / blockchain
• Strong knowledge of Merkle Trees and how they work
• A high degree of focus on code quality and reducing complexity
• Full stack capable, but with a focus on backend architecture, development and deployment at scale
• Knowledge of JavaScript and/or TypeScript
• Able to provide clear and constructive feedback on less senior engineers’ PR’s, mentoring where necessary

Nice-to-have experience

• Familiarity with current Ethereum tooling (for inspiration)
• An understanding of the finer details of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (again, for inspiration)
• An understanding of other Layer 2 solutions and their tooling
• Familiarity with other private blockchain technologies like ZCash
• Knowledge of peer-to-peer decentralised networking tools
• An understanding of arithmetic circuits and their unusual limitations

What we offer:

• A highly competitive compensation package (including equity)
• Flexible and remote work environment
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays annually
• An opportunity to work at the cutting edge of blockchain and FinTech with a world class cryptography and engineering team