VP of Research

Before you read the details of this role, there’s something you should know. At Matter Labs, we don’t see ourselves as a company, but as a highly aligned global team on a single mission: to accelerate the mass adoption of crypto for personal sovereignty. 

Our core technology – zkSync – is a layer 2 rollup that uses advanced cryptography called zero-knowledge proofs to scale Ethereum without compromising on security or decentralization. zkSync is EVM compatible, which means projects on Ethereum and other EVM-based blockchains can easily deploy on zkSync to take advantage of low gas fees and high transaction speeds.

With a total of $458 million in mission-driven funding, zkSync is the first EVM-compatible ZK Rollup to go live on testnet (February 2022) and be deployed on mainnet (October 2022). As we enter the endgame for Ethereum scaling, we are committed to full open source and building in public toward our stated mission [so that even if we fail, the community and the ecosystem will benefit from our contribution].

Read more about our core values and principles. 

As Matter Labs’ VP of Research you will play a pivotal role in driving the strategic direction of Matter Labs and report directly to our Chief Scientist, Alex Vlasov.

What You'll Be Doing:

• • Responsible for the full system design, including both which statements we will prove for the execution environment (VM design) and how we will prove it (circuit implementation)
  • Manage a small team of great engineers
  • Ability to be hands on when required. Yes, most of the time you will write code and not sit in meetings

What We Look For in You:

• • Experience with strongly-typed languages. Even though all our codebase is in Rust, Rust knowledge is not required. We expect you to be able to learn Rust quickly if necessary
  • Experience in implementing cryptographic primitives. At least minimal experience with circuit design is required. You should understand at least how branching works in circuits
  • Knowledge of modern zero knowledge proof protocols, it’s components and compositions: Plonk, Fractal, FRI, Orion, etc
  • Basic familiarity with Ethereum execution layer
  • Experience managing an engineering team
  • Ideally you should be able to solve the following simple task: assuming existence of circuit implementation of SHA round function like “fn round_function(state: State, buffer: [Byte; 64]) -> State” implement a circuit function that can compute Sha256 hash for any number of bytes up to 2048 (it should be a single circuit only depending on the upper bound of input bytes)
  • The most important characteristic is creativity and willingness to go above and beyond - start with something basic, and do better than anything created ever before. Web3 should progress faster and faster to become globally accepted and recognized

Working at Matter Labs

At Matter Labs, you have the freedom to work how you want, when you want, and from where you want. We operate in small, focused teams, with no time tracking and minimum bureaucracy. Only results matter. We will provide you with anything you need to learn, grow, and be productive.

Our results-only environment means anyone who believes in our mission can join us, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, and age. Both our team and community are made up of people from different countries, cultures, ethnical and religious backgrounds. That's why, out of politeness and respect, we refrain from opinions on politics, religion, or sex at the workplace. 

We designed our culture of freedom and ownership to persist as we scale and to establish the base for a positive-sum community as we move toward full decentralization.

Apply now if this role sounds of interest and we aim to get back to you as soon as possible.

Please let Matter Labs know that you found this job role on CryptoJobs.gg