Senior Compiler Engineer

Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution, supporting web3 networks with reliable and cost-efficient proof generation. We’re a high-performance cryptography startup with an exciting hardware twist looking for a talented Compiler Engineer.

About the role:

As a Senior Compiler Engineer, you will build tools to express computations on two types of novel machines, one digital and one virtual. The goals in these areas of our tech stack are:

1. Expression of verifiable programs with ZK constraint systems.
2. Translation of algorithms to target a custom cryptographic processor running on an FPGA.

You will work closely with the hardware and cryptography teams to define both the instruction sets and high-level program representations. The tools you build may be embedded programming languages, special-purpose compilers, and machine emulators. This work will have a direct impact on Irreducible’s success by improving the product’s developer experience, performance, and security.

Necessary Qualifications

• Proficiency in Rust
• Functional programming
• Experience writing CPU assembly code
• Experience writing virtual machine interpreters or emulators
• Strong written and verbal communications skills
• Ability to think across layers of abstractions
• Understanding of technology tradeoffs and a pragmatic approach to problem solving
• Desire to work in a fast-paced startup environment

Bonus Qualifications

• Familiarity with WebAssembly or RISC-V
• Experience writing compilers
• Experience with non-standard ISAs
• Experience with hardware accelerators for AI/ML
• Understanding of formal verification techniques
• Understanding of zero-knowledge cryptography

Know someone who could be a fit? Feel free to pass along a link to the role: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/irreducible/f816578c-bcf1-4705-8144-78f79dc4a98b

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.

[1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware

[2] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fpga-architecture-for-goldilocks-ntt

[3] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/binius-hardware-optimized-snark

[4] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-binius-improve-zero-knowledge-proofs

[5] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/introducing-ulvetanna

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.

NOTE: We can not sponsor visas of any kind at

this time.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.