Chain Protocol Engineer

We are hiring for one of our clients. They are a fast-growing Web3 startup rethinking how digital identity and reputation work online. They’re building privacy-first infrastructure that lets users prove who they are and what they’ve done—without giving up personal data. Backed by strong ecosystem partners and a passionate founding team, the company is shaping a more trusted and user-centric internet.

We are looking for a Protocol Engineer to design, implement, and operate the core software of a L1 Chain—focusing on reliability, performance, and the identity‑specific features.  You’ll work on client/runtime components, networking, cross‑chain identity flows, and ZK integrations that enable private verification at scale.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance the core node/client, covering execution/runtime, mempool, syncing, and networking layers to ensure reliability and scalability.
• Build identity-focused primitives, including credential issuance and verification logic, and extend system capabilities through precompiles or syscalls where needed.
• Optimize performance across state management (I/O, snapshots, pruning, and fast sync) and RPC endpoints to improve throughput and latency.
• Integrate zero-knowledge proof systems directly into the protocol, enabling on-chain verification of zk proofs and web-based attestations (e.g., zkTLS).
• Contribute to the identity oracle layer, defining message formats, securing replay/order handling, and ensuring consistent cross-chain finality.
• Design and maintain verification pathways, such as light clients or optimistic proofs, aligned with ecosystem standards (IBC/ICS, L1–L2 bridges, and messengers).
• Build robust relayer and operator tooling with strong incentives, monitoring, and observability baked in.
• Integrate decentralized storage solutions to enable privacy-preserving, reusable credential data.
• Tune low-level databases and commitment schemes (e.g., RocksDB, LevelDB) for fast and efficient identity verification operations.
• Deploy and operate testnets, manage release rollouts, and ensure smooth upgrades through canary testing and observability practices.
• Establish strong observability, adding metrics, logs, and dashboards to ensure transparency and rapid incident response.
• Expand and maintain test coverage through comprehensive unit, integration, fuzz, and differential testing across client versions.

Requirements

• Strong systems engineering in Go or Rust (or similar); solid concurrency/async, profiling, and performance tuning skills.
• Experience building backend or protocol‑adjacent infrastructure that runs in production.
• Practical familiarity with blockchain client internals (any of: EVM/WASM runtime, Cosmos SDK/Substrate modules, or rollup nodes).
• Comfortable with Web3 interfaces and ops: RPCs (JSON‑RPC/gRPC), node configuration, validator/sequencer operations, snapshots/state sync.
• Sound engineering practices: testing, code reviews, CI/CD, reproducible builds, and clear documentation.
• Security mindset: input validation, DoS/eclipse awareness, rate‑limiting, key management basics.

Nice-to-haves

• Zero‑knowledge integration experience (using/verifying proofs, e.g., PLONK/Groth16/FRI) or prior work on verifier precompiles.
• Exposure to identity/credentials standards (VCs/VPs), replay protection, nonce/sequence management, and capability/permissions models.
• Cross‑chain experience: light clients, optimistic/validity bridges, IBC/XCM, or L1↔L2 messaging.
• Database/storage tuning in high‑throughput chains; experience with state growth and archive modes.
• Contributions to open‑source blockchain clients or identity/zk tooling.