Engineering Manager Cryptography Team

Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. Join us as we accelerate the ZK revolution by supporting web3 networks with the worlds fastest most reliable and costefficient proof generation through cryptographic software and hardware codesign. We challenge conventional wisdom simplify complexity and execute with precision to build categorydefining technology. As we continue to scale we are looking for a talented Systems Engineer to join our Systems Engineering team in Berlin.

Role Overview

As the Engineering Manager of Irreducibles Cryptography Team youll lead a talented group of engineers dedicated to making Binius the leading opensource library for verifiable computing. Your teams mission is to deliver highperformance secure and developerfriendly cryptographic solutions positioning Binius as the preferred choice for zeroknowledge applications.

Youll be responsible for both people and project management collaborating closely with the CTOwho serves as the product technical leadto prioritize development efforts allocate resources and ensure timely delivery. Your role involves coordination with the cryptography research team to seamlessly transition theoretical innovations into robust practical solutions.

Role Location

• This role is based in Berlin. You must be located there or open to relocation and open to coming to our Mitte Berlin office 3 days per week.

• Visa sponsorship:We do sponsor visas for this role. However we arent able to successfully sponsor visas for every candidate. But if we make you an offer we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa but we cant make any guarantees.

• Youll need to be in the office three days per week in addition to more on as needed basis. For example if we have a weeklong company offsite youll need to be in the office the entire time.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of 510 engineers mostly seniorlevel fostering a highperforming collaborative culture.

• Manage the delivery of cryptographic protocols and algorithm implementations designed by the research team ensuring a focus on performance optimization security and simplicity.

• Oversee efforts aimed at lowlevel software performance improvements leveraging Rust and other optimization techniques.

• Ensure an excellent developer experience for external teams integrating Binius into their applications and virtual machines.

• Facilitate collaboration with systems software and hardware engineering teams to integrate and enhance our hardwareaccelerated proving stack.

• Ensure technical documentation clearly communicates complex cryptographic concepts and is maintained at a high standard.

• Lead hiring initiatives to actively grow the team in alignment with strategic goals.

Necessary Qualifications

• Proven experience managing highvelocity engineering teams (at least 5 engineers) focused on deep technology areas such as cryptography AI quantum computing robotics etc.

• Prior experience as a stafflevel engineer or equivalent.

• A degree in computer science engineering applied mathematics or a related field.

• Demonstrated organizational skills and adaptability in fastpaced environments.

• Excellent communication skills including the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts in writing.

• Previous experience working effectively within remote or hybrid remote team structures.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience in an earlystage startup environment 2040 employees).

• Familiarity with cryptographic principles especially zeroknowledge cryptography.

• Previous contributions to or maintenance of opensource software projects.

• Handson programming experience in Rust.

About Us (deep dive)...

Were building out a highperformance costefficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs specifically zkSNARKs. Verifiable computing with zkSNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that todays blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zkSNARKs 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 costeffective way 1. 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 codesigning hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation endtoend. Our firstgeneration tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailormade for our use case 2.

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 3 4 which we are currently developing into a productiongrade system.

Our team has crossdomain expertise and includes hardware designers lowlevel systems software engineers cryptography engineers and data center specialists several of whom worked in HFT previously.

1 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 dont fit 100 of the jobs necessary qualifications wed still love to hear from you.

To all recruitment agencies: Irreducible does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias Irreducible employees or any other organisation location. Irreducible is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please read our full policy here.