Software Engineer (Prototype) - Innovation R&D

Who are we?

IOG, is a technology company focused on Blockchain research and development. We are renowned for our scientific approach to blockchain development, emphasizing peer-reviewed research and formal methods to ensure security, scalability, and sustainability. Our projects include decentralized finance (DeFi), governance, and identity management, aiming to advance the capabilities and adoption of blockchain technology globally.

We invest in the unknown, applying our curiosity and desire for positive change to everything we do. By fueling creativity, innovation, and progress within our teams, our products and services are designed for people to be fearless, to be changemakers.

What the role involves:

As a prototype engineer, you will be looking at developing prototype, model, simulators, at the edge between engineering and research. You will work closely with various stakeholders (architect, cryptographer, researcher, engineer) to help and shape innovation projects.

• Follow Agile software development practices
• Work with teams across multiple time zones
• Work independently on software development tasks
• Be proactive and require minimal supervision or mentoring to complete tasks
• Review specifications produced by architects and formal methods specialists
• Contribute to the design of algorithms
• Write clean, straightforward, efficient code that satisfies previously agreed acceptance criteria and specifications
• Commit often and submit small pull requests frequently
• Cover your code with unit, property and integration tests when applicable
• Review the pull requests of your team mates
• Fix bugs in your own code and in legacy code from others
• Be available for emergency fixing of severity 1 issues on deployed products
• Integrate software components and third-party libraries
• Verify and deploy programs and systems
• Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade existing software
• Write documentation for the code
• Write technical user manuals

Requirements

Who you are:

• Degree in Computer Science is desirable but not essential  
• A minimum of 3+ years of software development experience 
• Experience working with Git and Git workflow
• Practical experience with Agile software development methods
• Knowledge of functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
• Proficiency in various programming languages and functional paradigms
• Knowledge of system programming languages (e.g. Rust, C++)
• Knowledge of some functional languages (e.g. Haskell, OCaml, F#)
• Optional knowledge of formal specification language (e.g. Lean)
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, including algorithms, data structures, and concurrency
• Knowledge of blockchain technology and its core concepts, such as consensus mechanisms, cryptography, and smart contracts
• Be knowledgeable of distributed and concurrent computation
• Be knowledgeable of the basics of cryptography
• Self motivating and self learner, willing to learn new ways of doing things
• Write highlevel design documents 
• Capable to read scientific papers
• Write small prototype to demonstrate a feature or a protocol
• Write idiomatic code that satisfies the acceptance criteria of a given task
• Write tests (unit tests, property tests) that provide sufficient and non-superfluous efficient code coverage.
• Document code and APIs concisely and unambiguously
• Break down tasks into sub-tasks that are completable in a short amount of time and report completion as required by managers
• Pragmatically adhere to software engineering principles (modularity, incremental development, no premature optimization, no feature creep, no speculative generality, ...)

Benefits

• Remote work
• Laptop reimbursement
• New starter package to buy hardware essentials (headphones, monitor, etc)
• Learning & Development opportunities
• Competitive PTO 

At IOG, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.