Distributed Systems Engineer

About Heliax

The systems of coordination and finance in our world today are not private or resilient enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a distributed systems engineer interested in helping us quickly, safely, and performantly implement the distributed operating system Anoma. As a member of the Anoma engineering team, you will be working on distributed ledger technology implemented in Elixir, all the way up and down the stack from the P2P layer to consensus algorithms, transaction execution systems, and privacy-enhancing cryptographic components.

This role offers the chance to work closely with experts and researchers in various domains. From cryptography to distributed systems research, a good sample of the work we do can be found on our Anoma Research Topics page, and the primary codebase can be found at github.com/anoma/anoma. The job of Anoma engineering is often to help synthesise ideas found in research into an integrated system. In practice, this means that the role will include giving feedback to researchers about their designs, shaping their research to help fit an integrated system, discuss principled system design and engineering, and ultimately implementing the ideas (primarily in Elixir).

The role offers a chance to work and develop in an interactive Elixir codebase. In particular, we encourage tooling (visual or otherwise) that can help explain the system to others.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate algorithmic complexity and implementation difficulty of possible new protocols, giving feedback to researchers and organisational leadership.
• Implement protocols in performant and cleanly abstracted Elixir (and occasionally Rust, C, or Nock) code.
• Benchmark implementations and adjust both high-level architecture and low-level details in order to optimise for performance while retaining semantic correctness.
• Comprehensively document and test protocols and protocol changes; conduct code reviews in coordination with other team members; help maintain a high standard of quality across the codebase.
• Help bring Anoma to production!

Qualifications

• Experience with Erlang, Elixir, or similar.
• Ability to work independently and reliably without extensive supervision.
• Familiarity with large-scale distributed systems, network/systems engineering, operating systems engineering, blockchain technology, and/or database system design and optimization.
• Good communication and collaboration skills; experience working with both engineers and researchers.
• Industry experience in bringing systems to production.
• Experience modifying or hacking on existing operating systems (live language runtimes count!).
• Ability to regularly join meetings in evening European time (e.g. 14-19 CET).

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with Smalltalk, Lisp, Forth, Factor, Prolog or anything similar.

Misc

• Must be willing to travel to Europe for initial onboarding, and several times a year for team retreats (these costs are covered by Heliax).
• Ideally someone who enjoys travel, nature, and hiking. Often we find that protocols are best designed not in a meeting room but rather on a trail.