***This role is not for direct PL employment but for our PL Network portfolio of companies.  Please read below to find out more about our innovative PL Network***

About the Protocol Labs Network

The recruiting team is supporting the Protocol Labs Network (PLN) — a community of open source teams, projects, and organizations focused on researching, developing, and deploying network protocols to improve humanity’s most influential technology, the Internet. These Web3 teams and organizations are supported by the PL Ventures team through grants and investments – think of it as a VC + crypto fund model. As this ecosystem grows, these projects invest in the network itself, and the network grows along with it, which in turn benefits and incentivizes this ongoing evolution of Web2 to Web3. PLN is made up of 450+ projects, companies, and organizations.  To note, this job posting is for the community of external companies inside of the PLN and is not for direct Protocol Labs employment.

As a Distributed Systems Engineer, you may….

• Create or maintain software libraries and programs depended on by other systems and applications
• Contribute to protocol design and specification efforts
• Participate in the design and implementation of performant and resilient distributed applications
• Develop solutions to hard problems in low-trust distributed systems
• Integrate research results and demonstrations into working, scalable programs and systems
• Work alongside a cross-functional team including engineering, design, community, product, and business
• Engage and educate the community, from users to contributors

You may be a fit for this role if you have….

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, related field or equivalent practical experience
• Significant experience building applications using Go, Rust, JavaScript, or related languages 
• A solid understanding of distributed systems principles and applications
• Experience designing and building distributed and/or p2p software systems and applications.
• A strong technical design ability informed by broad experience across multiple domains/specialties
• Literacy with cryptographic principles and practices
• In-depth knowledge of authentication protocols and applied cryptography
• Demonstrated the ability to implement cryptographic primitives
• Knowledge of the latest attack trends, tools and the threat landscape
• Experience with 1 or more of the following: Smart Contracts, storage platforms, UNIX file systems, VMs (preferred)
• Proven track record of independently driving projects in a fast-paced environment
• Excellent communication skills on both technical and non-technical issues
• A keen awareness of teamwork, process, and patterns of successful collaboration
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Bonus Points

• Experience leading open source projects, and/or guiding their communities 
• Security engineering and/or cryptography principles and practices
• Large-scale systems (especially networking, performance, storage, or reliability engineering)
• Experience building with decentralized building blocks such as DHTs, consensus protocols, smart contracts, blockchain, p2p networking, etc

Job locations: Remote