Job Specifications
Who are we?
IOG, is a technology company focused on Blockchain research and development. We are renowned for our scientific approach to blockchain development, emphasizing peer-reviewed research and formal methods to ensure security, scalability, and sustainability. Our projects include decentralized finance (DeFi), governance, and identity management, aiming to advance the capabilities and adoption of blockchain technology globally.
We invest in the unknown, applying our curiosity and desire for positive change to everything we do. By fueling creativity, innovation, and progress within our teams, our products and services are designed for people to be fearless, to be changemakers.
What the role involves:
As a Senior Software Engineer, you are responsible for improving how IOG builds and maintains software, alongside actively contributing to product development. Senior Software Engineer is responsible for the quality of engineering practices within a team. Senior Software Engineers work across teams to identify cross-team improvements for IOG by (for example) sharing code, removing complexity or implementing new practices. As a senior member of the team you are expected to mentor and grow other software engineers and act as a go-to person within the team and the wider organisation across multiple codebases and languages.
Advocate for and model high-quality engineering practices, proactively addressing complex and subtle system issues
Apply systematic debugging to diagnose issues across multiple related domains, and foster a culture of observability and monitoring across teams
Collaborate cross-functionally to promote iterative, autonomous development practices and enable future scalability
Act as a technical and prioritization leader across several domains, identifying gaps in understanding and pushing boundaries of technical excellence
Serve as a go-to expert within the team and wider organization, working confidently across multiple codebases and programming languages
Operate with a high degree of autonomy, requiring minimal supervision or mentoring to deliver complex tasks
Review specifications from architects and formal methods specialists, ensuring feasibility and alignment with design principles
Lead the design and integration of software components and their interactions, including third-party libraries
Ensure reliability of deployed products by providing availability for emergency response to severity 1 issues
Contribute to high-quality deliverables by verifying, deploying, and documenting programs and systems
Produce clear technical documentation and user manuals to support maintainability and knowledge sharing
Requirements
Who you are:
Degree in Computer Science is desirable but not essential
7+ years of software engineering experience
Experience working with Git and Git workflow
Practical experience with Agile software development methods
Knowledge of functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
Ability to understand project needs, objectives and timescales to feed into planning and setting deadlines for a specific stream.
Clearly articulates new issues, suggests changes to management for implementation
Write idiomatic code that satisfies the acceptance criteria of a given task
Write tests (unit tests, property tests) that provide sufficient and non-superfluous efficient code coverage
Document code and APIs concisely and unambiguously
Provide detailed guidance on the work to be done, assist with task assignments and deliver deep reviews and feedback on the work
Pragmatically adhere to software engineering principles (modularity, incremental development, no premature optimization, no feature creep, no speculative generality, ...)
Specialist Skills
Advanced proficiency in multiple programming languages and functional paradigms, with the ability to select the most effective tools for prototyping and proof-of-concept work
Expertise in at least one system programming language (e.g., Rust, C++), with strong performance optimisation and debugging skills
Proficiency in functional languages (e.g., Haskell, OCaml, F#) and ability to apply functional programming principles in complex, production-grade prototypes
Familiarity or experience with formal specification languages (e.g., Lean, Coq, TLA+) to model and verify protocol behaviour when needed
Strong theoretical grounding in computer science, including algorithms, data structures, concurrency models, and distributed systems design
Comprehensive understanding of blockchain technology, including consensus mechanisms, applied cryptography, networking protocols, and smart contract frameworks
Proven self-direction, with the ability to independently identify problems, explore novel solutions, and rapidly adopt emerging tools and techniques
Ability to design and document high-level architecture and system specifications for experimental or prototype systems, communicating trade-offs and assumptions clearly
Proficient in reading and synthesisin
About the Company
Founded in 2015, IOHK is one of the world’s pre-eminent blockchain research and engineering companies, best known for the Cardano blockchain platform
We are a fully decentralized, remote-working organization committed to the highest principles of academic rigour and evidence-based software development. The company builds high-assurance blockchain products for public and private sector clients.
Our goal is simple – to fuel our drive to be best in class by giving you the opportunity, resources and support to deliver your fines...
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