COMPANY IN BRIEF

Interchain GmbH is a 13-person company which works on core blockchain technology. We’re headquartered in Berlin, Germany, but our team stretches from New York, NY to Ulyanovsk, Russia. We keep in touch through Github, Slack, and Zoom, and meet in person periodically (when COVID permits). All in all, the software we develop secures billions of dollars in value across many different systems, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We strive to build world-class software while having plenty of laughs along the way.

POSITION IN BRIEF

So far, our engineering team has led development and stewardship of the Tendermint Core consensus engine and the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC). IBC is an open-source protocol for end-to-end communication between heterogeneous distributed ledgers — in many ways analogous to TCP/IP, an open-source protocol for end-to-end communication between heterogeneous machines. As IBC reaches the 1.0 release milestone and moves into production on the Cosmos Hub, we’re looking for an engineering lead to spearhead the next phase of IBC development for the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond.

As IBC engineering lead, you’ll be responsible for setting a development roadmap in collaboration with the research team, managing engineering efforts to implement new protocol features, extensions, and improvements, heading stewardship of the x/ibc subsection of the Cosmos SDK repository, and occasionally contributing to various parts of the Cosmos stack (such as the SDK & Gaia) as necessary to support IBC. 

YOUR ACTIVITIES WILL INCLUDE

• Working closely with the protocol research teams at IG and Informal Systems and community stakeholders to build consensus around a post-1.0 IBC development roadmap for the entire ecosystem
• Leading sustainable open-source stewardship for the x/ibc subsection of the Cosmos SDK Github repository, creating contribution guidelines, reviewing community code submissions, answering questions, and coordinating open-source collaborators along with the internal team
• Managing engineering efforts to implement new IBC features such as cross-chain validation, 1-n broadcast channels, and directed acyclic packet ordering, address potential performance bottlenecks, and improve internal software quality
• Contributing directly to development in Golang, reviewing code, ensuring that standards of quality and test-case coverage are met, and cross-testing Golang implementations against IBC implementations in other languages developed by other teams
• Keeping an ever-vigilant eye on security considerations, ensuring that contributions (internal or external) receive adequate review, and coordinating with ecosystem stakeholders to handle security incidents when they occur
• In coordination with other Interchain GmbH team members and the development roadmap, determining resource requirements, writing job descriptions, and conducting hiring processes for engineers on the IBC team

This is a pretty open-ended job description. IBC is an open-source protocol with a wide stakeholder set and many possible future directions. Part of your role will be to help define it!

WHAT EXPERTISE WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• Experience leading engineering teams, especially ones working on a cutting-edge, complex, real-world software product with security-critical safety considerations
• Expertise in systems design and an appropriate taste for simplicity, both in internal abstraction structure and in choice of third-party dependencies
• Top-notch communications skills, clear written prose, and a knack for working with a diverse range of contributors and users, synthesizing different perspectives, and mediating occasional disputes
• Experience in open-source development, stewardship, and/or maintenance, especially for a piece of software with substantial community involvement and a diverse contributor base
• A working familiarity with the Go programming language, consensus algorithms and distributed systems, TCP/IP networking, and blockchains or other distributed databases
• A high degree of personal responsibility and ownership: you’ll be responsible for setting deadlines and holding yourself and your team accountable to them
• A home base within our working timezones, probably from UTC - 5 (New York) to UTC + 3 (Moscow), and the ability to travel to continental Europe at least occasionally (post-COVID)

There are no hard requirements on previous experience. Not sure if you're a fit? Please feel free to apply anyways, and we'll take it from there.