Research Cryptographer & Mathematician

Role Overview

The systems of coordination and finance in our world today are not private enough for safe use by citizens, corporations, or dissidents. Heliax is looking for a research mathematician & cryptographer interested in working with us to design, evaluate, and implement zero-knowledge proof constructions such as zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs, distributed cryptographic protocols such as threshold encryption and distributed key generation, cryptographic primitives such as elliptic curves and hash functions, and multi-party protocols constructed with many of these primitives as components, then put this cryptography into practice in order to realize the information flow control and scalability capabilities required to realize the vision of Anoma.

This role offers the chance to work closely with a small team on compelling cross-disciplinary problems in theoretical computer science, cryptography, game theory, economics, and systems design, and enjoy a high degree of independence in working conditions and task prioritization.

What you'll do

• Design new cryptographic protocols from first principles to achieve specified information flow topologies, external interfaces, security properties, and performance characteristics.
• Evaluate and analyze existing cryptographic protocols, often zkSNARK or zkSTARK proof systems (e.g. Halo 2, ProtoStar) for security, expressivity, and performance.
• Update, alter, reimplement, and combine existing cryptographic protocols, customizing them for specific proofs-of-concept and production use-cases.
• Produce comprehensive technical specifications for designs & instantiations of cryptographic protocols (a la the Zcash Protocol Spec and collaborate with research engineers & cryptography engineers on implementations of these protocols.
• Implement, review, and test cryptographic operations & protocols, primarily in Rust, evaluate existing implementations for correctness and performance. For example, we contribute to Arkworks.

Example projects

• Taiga, Anoma’s privacy-preserving resource machine (with VM-like characteristics)
• The Ferveo DKG & threshold decryption protocol
• Cryptography research on Anoma's Blog, Zenodo, or the Anoma research forum
• Papers such as Bandersnatch
• Research into private solving