About the Ethereum Foundation
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a global non-profit dedicated to supporting Ethereums long-term success. Our mission is to allocate resources to critical projects advocate for Ethereum within the ecosystem and promote its vision to the world.
About the Team and Role
The EF recently launched the dAI Team focused on making Ethereum the global decentralized settlement and coordination layer for AI. Our aim is to pioneer the field of AI on blockchains: defining standards supporting open-source builders and laying the groundwork for AI systems that are secure verifiable and censorship-resistant.
As a Member of AI Staff you will join a small research-driven group tackling frontier problems at the intersection of AI and decentralized systems. Youll work on open questions around multi-agent coordination verifiable inference privacy-preserving compute and decentralized infrastructure for AI. The role is highly collaborative spanning research engineering and engagement with leading AI and Web3 projects worldwide.
Key Responsibilities
Lay the foundations of a new discipline (AI on blockchains): Conduct foundational research at the intersection of AI and Ethereummulti-agent systems coordination decentralization of key components in the AI stack AI system validation and privacy.
Influence the roadmap of the dAI Team: Translate research into applied proposals that improve the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem infrastructure.
Research in conversation with the community not in isolation: AI on Ethereum is fundamentally about using the chain as a coordination layer to foster security privacy composability and other properties that centralized AI cannot provide. Staying closely connected to the community is a priorityboth by actively sharing new projects and results outwardly and by drawing inspiration from the many experiments ecosystem teams are running in this emerging field.
Requirements
Relevant background: Demonstrated skills related to state-of-the-art model development practices emergent frameworks and tooling or privacy-preserving compute methods. Prior experience with blockchain protocols is a plus. Contributions to open source AI or distributed systems projects are especially valued.
Research excellence: Strong background in research whether in academia labs or applied industry settings. Experience ideally includes AI distributed systems optimization or cryptography. A PhD is welcome but not required if you have a strong track record of impactful projects.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills: Comfortable collaborating with diverse teams across both the AI and open-source/blockchain ecosystems as well as with academic researchers and industry practitioners.
Passion for decentralized AI: Strong motivation to carve an alternative path for AIone that is open source censorship resistant democratic private and secure.
Ability to thrive in a distributed environment: Comfortable working in a fully remote asynchronous organization across time zones.
How We Work
We work like an open applied research lab embedded in the Ethereum ecosystem. Most contributions are public by default and we collaborate directly with academics independent researchers startups and open-source communities. The culture rewards initiative rigorous thinking and a willingness to engage across disciplines. This role is ideal for someone who wants to shape the foundations of a new field while staying close to both research and real-world applications.
Other Details
This is a full-time role. Our team is distributed globally and remote work from anywhere is possiblewith most synchronous time from 2pm UTC onwards.
Some travel to events (Devcon Devconnect AI Ethereum workshops) is expected.
Competitive compensation flexible time-off.