Rust Cryptography Engineer for Lurk

About Protocol Labs

Protocol Labs drives breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. Protocol Labs is a product-development lab, but behind the protocols and tools we build, behind the research and implementations, are passionate people, teammates, and community members. Most teams in the Protocol Labs Network are fully distributed and work remotely around the world. Engineers, researchers, and operators work in the open to improve the internet — humanity's most important technology — as we explore new advances at the intersection of many exciting fields (web3, cryptography, networks, distributed systems) and cultures (startups, research, open-source, distributed work).

About Lurk Lab

Lurk Lab is an entity within Protocol Labs that is building Lurk (https://github.com/lurk-lang), a Turing-complete programming language for recursive SNARKs. Lurk implements a minimal Lisp whose program executions can be proven in zero-knowledge, yielding succinct proofs which are concretely small and fast to verify. Lurk uses a Rust implementation (https://github.com/lurk-lang/lurk-rs) for expression evaluation, proving, and verification, with Nova (https://github.com/microsoft/Nova/) as its proving backend. Because Lurk is Turing-complete, it can be used to make and prove arbitrary computational claims (within resource limits).

A “Rust Cryptography Engineer for Lurk” will support the development of the Lurk programming language, including core language features and libraries. The ideal candidate for this job will have experience writing zk-proofs or zk-proof adjacent software in Rust.

Job Responsibilities...

• Work closely with the current Lurk engineering team, a technical program manager, and core collaborators to support the growth of the language
• Invest significant time in learning and understanding the current Lurk language and understanding its trajectory
• Maintain and develop the code base As needed:
• Write Lurk circuits in Rust
• Support and improve Nova integration and other proving backends
• Work directly in or with forks of external repositories on which Lurk depends (, , )
• Author new libraries to improve manual and automated creation of efficient circuits/witnesses
• Engage with research literature and researchers to ensure the correct deployment of new technologies

You might be a good fit for this job if you...

• Are excited by cutting-edge cryptography
• Have experience coding cryptographic circuits
• Love working in Rust
• Have been a part of open source collaborations across organizations and repositories
• Are familiar with the landscape and technology of zk-SNARKs
• Grok why a Turing-complete language for recursive zk-SNARKs is significant
• Are familiar with one or more SNARK proving systems (Lurk currently supports Groth16 and will soon support Nova proofs)
• Want to turn cryptography research into working tech