Summary
What you’ll impact
An organization is seeking a senior founding engineer to own and build core Rust systems, protocols, and infrastructure that power its decentralized community platform. The role involves shaping emerging AT Protocol specifications, implementing cryptographic payment systems, and contributing to open‑source projects while representing the organization in standards bodies.
Responsibilities
What you'll do
- You’ll own large parts of the Rust systems that make all of the above run, working directly with our founder, with real ownership from day one.
- Depending on what the network needs, the work spans backend, systems, infrastructure, and product features.
- You’ll read, pressure-test, and weigh in on emerging specifications, then build them: permissioned data and spaces, community and group moderation, and private payments among them.
- You’ll own building e-cash mints and the payment systems around them, and you’ll represent Blacksky in standards venues, including the IETF and the broader AT Protocol community.
- The Rust services behind our feeds, data, and APIs, and our e-cash mint and payment systems
- Reading, shaping, and implementing emerging protocol specifications (permissioned data and spaces, community and group moderation, private payments), and representing Blacksky in standards work, including the IETF
- Consuming and processing the network’s real-time firehose: high-throughput event streams that stay reliable and in sync across millions of accounts and billions of records, with a backfill that never really stops
- Applied cryptography across the stack, implementing (rather than inventing) the schemes our systems rely on: the signed, content-addressed data and commitments at the core of the protocol, the e-cash behind the mint, and end-to-end encryption for private spaces, including helping bring in outside efforts like Encrypted Spaces
- Performance and reliability of large Postgres deployments and the storage and caching around them
- The backend behind our moderation and safety tooling, including the labeling systems that keep the community protected
- rsky, our open-source Rust implementation of the protocol, and our contributions back to the open social web
- Forks of other open source projects in the atproto ecosystem
Requirements
What you’ll bring
- A senior engineer with deep experience (think 8+ years) building and shipping production backend, systems, or infrastructure software, with hard problems owned end to end
- Strong in Rust, or strong enough in a systems language like C++ or Go that picking up Rust isn’t a question
- Comfortable working in any area of the stack that an engineering problem calls for
- Genuinely comfortable with applied cryptography and protocol design: you can read a spec full of signatures, hashes, and commitment schemes, reason about how it fails, and implement it correctly
- At home with high-throughput, real-time data systems, and you know where operating systems, networks, storage, and databases actually break
- Sound judgment under ambiguity, a bias for simple solutions, and a high bar for reliability