NEAR Protocol is a developer-first blockchain that emphasizes convenience of development and scalability on NEAR platform. The core component of NEAR is WebAssembly virtual machine that runs in a completely trustless and fully deterministic mode, as it executes contracts implemented in WebAssembly-friendly languages using a fast compiler. NEAR contributes a lot of effort into performance and safety optimizations of WebAssembly VMs/compilers which helps not only NEAR but the entire WebAssembly ecosystem.

We are looking for an Engineer with experience in low-level programming who is intrigued by a variety of open problems inherent to running compilers in completely trustless but high-performance setting, and who likes contributing and collaborating with open-source communities.

Role

At this position you will be solving cutting-edge compiler and VM problems related to safe, deterministic, and high-performance compilation and execution. You will interfacing with many open-source projects where you might be asked to represent NEAR organization. In the future, your work might extend beyond WebAssembly VM into other types of VMs that NEAR will choose to support.

Competencies

• Knowledge of C, C++ or Rust. All of our code is in Rust. We can teach you Rust if you are already a C or C++ expert;
• Familiarity with low-level programming (compilers, operating systems, hypervisors, etc). Knowledge of virtual machines specifically is a plus;
• >5 years of experience
• Experience of maintaining a project
• You should be able to work with your peers and other teams with a shared sense of purpose. No room for ego here. People should want to work with you;

Preferred but optional:

• Contributions to open-source software
• Experience with Rust API design

About NEAR and the NEAR Collective

NEAR's purpose is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world and its mission is to drive the adoption of Open Technologies. The NEAR platform provides a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands.

The NEAR platform, NEAR Protocol, and associated tooling are being built by the NEAR Collective, a collection of the best engineers in the world who work across teams, companies and countries similar to other large scale open-source projects. Core contributors include a couple of 2-time ICPC world champions, 4 gold medalists, a Latin American champion and multiple other competitive programming finalists.

About the NEAR Foundation

The NEAR Foundation is a nonprofit, non-beneficiary foundation based in Switzerland which supports community-driven innovation and the Open Web with a specific focus on the NEAR platform. The Foundation distributes grant funding into the NEAR ecosystem, coordinates governance among participants, educates people about the protocol and ensures that relationships among the community members are as strong and sustainable as the apps they build. It seeks to combine the inclusive care of a community-driven NGO with the at-scale effectiveness of a Silicon Valley startup.