Senior Software Optimization Engineer

Come join Irreducible as we accelerate the ZK revolution by 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 Senior Software Optimization Engineer. A more technical description of what we do is below

About the role:

As a senior software optimization engineer in our systems software team, you will have a direct impact on Irreducible’s success. You will design, implement and optimize our software stack that integrates our FPGA accelerators into cryptographic application code. This involves optimal management of memory and compute resources, detailed performance profiling, as well as modification and instrumentation of cryptography code.

To achieve this, you will work closely with our FPGA and cryptography engineers to codesign hardware-software interfaces, and with the infrastructure engineers to develop and deploy software to Irreducible’s bare metal server cluster.

Location: We are a globally distributed company and operate across multiple time zones between US Eastern time and Eastern European Time. For this role, GMT+2 (Berlin time) is preferred, but not required.

Necessary Qualifications:

• Expertise and proven experience in performance optimization in any of Rust, C++ or C
• Ability to efficiently benchmark, tune and optimize non-trivial multi-threaded software
• Ability to optimize across layers of abstraction: Algorithms, concurrency, scheduling, operating system (Linux) performance tweaking, large data and memory constraints, recommendation of hardware configurations.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Aptitude for math and computer algorithms
• Understanding of cryptographic proof systems and zero-knowledge cryptography
• Experience in any of the following:

• Modifying and contributing to open-source codebases
• Implementing high-performance software and distributed systems
• Programming embedded processors and Linux kernel modules/drivers
• Programming GPUs or FPGAs
• Implementing low-level cryptographic primitives

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. 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.

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, 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.

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.

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