Staff Compiler Engineer

Who We Are

Seismic is building a cryptosystem for multiparty zero knowledge (ZK). Our construction makes it possible to maintain on-chain hidden data that different groups of people can interact with. Customers span all protocols that require access control for their user state. Among them are the highest caliber application teams in the industry: SmallBrain Games, Bounce Finance, Unyfy, Tomo, Cartridge, and Story Protocol, to name a few. We're backed by a16z and Polychain (>3 years of runway) to carry out a roadmap that involves advanced cryptography (zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, multi-party compuation) and low level VM improvements (compiler modifications, orchestrated bytecode deployment, high throughput
proof generation). More on us can be found here, and our technical roadmap here.

The Role

We've spent the last 10 months demonstrating how multiparty ZK can be the next step change in decentralized applications (dapps). We've done so via nine pilot partnerships that are slated for Mainnet deployments in Q2/Q3 2024. Each project in this cohort features a bespoke instantiation of our construction. In other words, we wrote an application-specific validator, contract, and circuit for each one. It's an unscalable practice that has given us the opportunity to validate our hypotheses with real customers. The results were promising.

Each partnership yielded a dapp that 1) is novel to blockchains, and 2) has the potential to become seminal work. It's now time to build a generic implementation of our system and turn these nine partners into ninety. We want to give developers self-serve access to multiparty ZK in their native smart contract languages. We want regular developers to do in days what our specialized team did in months with bespoke instantiations. A development experience like this requires building out our own EVM+ language via extensive modifications to compiler front-ends. We're looking to hire a senior compiler engineer to own this process.

Who You Are

Our ideal teammate fits the following descriptions:

1. You love crypto. Our entire team is oriented around getting crypto into its next stage. You should want this as much as any of us.

2. You are comfortable with writing preprocessors for Solidity and/or Yul.

3. You have deep knowledge of the internals of some compiler. You can manipulate the AST, modify the parser, and add to codegen. Bonus if your bread-and-butter pick is a compiler for an EVM language like Solidity / Vyper / Fe.

4. [BONUS] You have experience with basic cryptography. Just knowing what public key cryptography
   is would be plenty. Not required- we will give you a crash course.

Guiding Questions

If you were asked questions that looked like the following, would you be excited and prepared to
investigate? If so, you're an excellent fit.

1. How would you extend Solidity to add new language constructs and syntactic sugar in the most maintainable way possible?

2. How would you extend an EVM implementation to support new functionality? Again, how can we ensure this is as simple and maintainable as possible?

3. How can we integrate new compiler infrastructure to existing tooling such as Hardhat, Foundry, and existing Language Servers?

What We Offer

We're an early stage team still at only 6 engineers. Among us are founding engineers from the most exciting projects in the space (Scroll, Matter, Monad, Wintermute) and academics from the leading institutions in the science of blockchains (Stanford, MIT, Columbia). With that said, we're still missing clear leadership in the role described here.

You would be a critical player in the next stage of this company.

On top of this, we also offer the following:

1. Opportunity to grow into any leadership role in the company. Our org is completely flat at the
   moment. Notably, C-suite and VP designations have not and will not take place until mid 2025.

2. Competitive salary and generous equity package.

3. Relocation benefits to join us in-person in our office in New York. We have a strong preference for in-person hires.

4. Visa and immigration support for the US.