Systems Engineer

What You Will Do

About HOPR

HOPR is building the next generation of network-level privacy infrastructure through a decentralized mixnet protocol. We're creating technology that allows data to travel across the internet without metadata leakage—protecting not just what you say, but who you're talking to. Our protocol is fully open-source and designed for decentralized deployment.

As we scale our network and bring the first product using it to market, we need systems engineers who can optimize low-level networking performance while maintaining the security guarantees that make HOPR unique.

The role

You'll be a core contributor to HOPRd (our protocol implementation) and the HOPR network stack, working at the intersection of high-performance networking, decentralized systems, and privacy technology. This is a hands-on role where you'll own significant parts of our networking infrastructure and have a direct impact on protocol performance and reliability.

• Work with a helpful and experienced team to design, build and test HOPRd and the HOPR protocol and auxiliary systems, with a strong focus on all things networking
• Enhance the packet processing pipeline, runtime system, work offloading, p2p networking, etc.
• Read and write code in Rust, most of our codebase is in Rust. All the code is open-source.
• Help to improve the performance on every layer, be a single function or entire sub-systems, always with a focus on provability and benchmarking.

Who You Are

• Are familiar with networking concepts and protocols and comfortable in Rust
• Have dealt with networks, network integration and have previously worked with plain UDP
• Love to make networks perform at their line rate, knowing that it requires rigorous analysis, potentially novel architecture, and careful implementation. While this might not be achievable for HOPR, it's an important mindset to have.
• Appreciate the hard-won thrill of debugging a knotty problem to root cause
• Believe in fully documenting your ideas for your colleagues and future self
• Enjoy reading the documentation produced by your peers
• Make the tools you wish you had, rather than waiting for them to appear

Before applying for this role, you should:

• Browse through our public monorepo [1] and see how we work
• Check out the HOPR basics articles on Medium [2] and read through the latest documentation on how to actually run a HOPR node [3]
• Enjoy the technical detail of our RFCs [4]

[1] https://github.com/hoprnet/hoprnet/
[2] https://medium.com/hoprnet/subpage/basics
[3] https://docs.hoprnet.org/
[4] https://rfc.hoprnet.org/

What We Can Offer You

• Remote first: Our team is based in Europe across multiple cities and countries. While we do have a small base in Zurich, Switzerland, remote work is in our DNA.
• Flexible working hours: Families and lives outside of HOPR are important to us. Our schedules are flexible and to support each team member’s life.
• Team retreats: We try to meet in person as often as we can/want. Full team retreats happen twice a year, small group work retreats are always possible.
• Unlimited vacation policy: No limit on the number of vacation days taken per year.
• Hardware allowance: You can get whatever hardware you need to be the most productive.
• Education and conference allowance: We support the continuous education of our team members.