Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems

What is the job?

As a distributed systems engineer at RDX Works, you get to do all the fun stuff. No turning reams of procedural business logic into code for you! Your days will be filled with hard, interesting problems - thinking through all the ways things can go wrong and coming up with solutions which are both elegant and practical - and then turning these into code. You will be tackling synchronization, consensus and networking problems that often have no perfect answer. You will meddle with dark powers best left untouched, learn more about decentralized systems than you dreamed was possible, and work with an inspiring team of incredible people. You will make your mother proud, even if you’re never quite able to properly explain to her what it is you built!

You will first come up to speed by aiding in the delivery of some new improvements to our distributed public ledger. Building upon this knowledge, you will venture into new territory, solving the challenges ahead to bring programmability to the Radix public network in our next major release. From this point forward you will be making new ground right at the cutting edge of a rapidly evolving branch of computer science, as we embark on a journey towards a novel, massively sharded release which will enable unlimited scale.

What are we looking for?

• You are a prolific, confident coder, and are persistent in working problems to resolution.
• You possess strong attention to detail, and are rarely surprised by unconsidered edge cases.
• You’ve used generic types so much that the angle bracket keys on your keyboard are beginning to wear away
• You are unafraid of working in a space where there is little prior art to refer to
• You have done and like to do demonstrably hard things
• You enjoy talking through tough problems with smart people, and are happy to accept ideas and approaches that you didn’t personally come up with

What do you need?

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent
• 5+ years working as a professional software developer
• Fluent in Java or Rust (Java and Rust is what you’ll be using here)
• Completely comfortable with asynchronous programming models

Some of the following experience will help you stand out:

• Noddingly familiar with the practical aspects of asymmetric cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs, and having an understanding of the underlying theoretical foundations
• First-hand experience working with large data sets and dealing with complex distributed systems, and are all too familiar with the attendant complications and gremlins that emerge once not-perfectly-reliable things start talking to each other over a not-perfectly-reliable network
• Experience with or knowledge of authenticated data structures
• Hands on experience with big data tools such as Hadoop, Cassandra etc
• Experience with blockchain/DLT development
• Have a background in computer science or a scientific qualification with demonstrable experience in consensus
• Experience implementing a BFT-style consensus protocol

Who are we?

At RDX Works, we're a team of like-minded thinkers who have long been convinced that we're living in the earliest stages of a global financial revolution. This revolution is being fuelled by decentralized finance (or DeFi for short), which is enabling an assortment of pioneering developers and entrepreneurs to re-invent almost every financial product that is currently traded and invested in traditional markets, without requiring central authorities or siloed infrastructure. DeFi has captured a great deal of attention and investment in the crypto-aware niche, growing assets under management from $1 billion to over $200 billion in a few years. Impressive as its growth has been, its current market size isn't even a rounding error on the over $400 trillion held in traditional finance. We're focused on what it will take to go from billions to trillions.

RDX went back to first principles to come up with the right technical solution—the first layer-one protocol built specifically for mainstream DeFi—and we have already tested out at over 1 million transactions per second. We're keenly aware that the need for an infinitely scalable platform is only one prerequisite among many for mass adoption, and we're also blazing new ground in the areas of purpose-built developer tools, user experiences, and regulatory integration.

We have forged a path deep into the future of what distributed ledger technology is going to look like and we need you to come and be part of the team that is making that happen right now.

If this job sounds like it was made for you, then please apply directly here or email errico.dipiazza@rdx.works for more information.

Alternatively, if you feel like you don’t match all of the requirements, we would love you to still apply anyway. We understand that confidence gaps and imposter syndrome can get in the way of meeting incredible candidates and we wouldn’t want this to prevent us from meeting you; especially as we are big advocates of helping people learn & grow. This is also another reason we do not advertise salaries, we want to keep it as even a playing field as possible!