Senior Decentralised Systems Engineer

Job content

SICPA is building solutions for digital cash (CBDC). This is a fascinating space involving strong elements of cybersecurity, cryptography, cloud, embedded, mesh networking, and mobile — as well as economics, regulation, public policy, privacy, financial inclusion, and usability. We have expertise in many of these areas already. For this position, we are looking for a coder — not a solution architect or a DevOps expert — that writes excellent software for devices that live at “the edge” — partly or fully disconnected from the Internet. This could include mobile and NFC/BlueTooth/UltraWideBand, but might also involve smartcards, point-of-sale terminals, and so forth. We’re imagining someone who is comfortable in Rust, Go, Java, and/or C/C++, and who has some experience at the level of hardware. The job title has “Decentralised Systems” in it because what we create will be part of a complex ecosystem with many interconnections, operated by many parties. Blockchain experience is quite relevant, but plays a supporting role rather than being the focus.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• ​​​​​​​Design stuff with a team of creative people.
• Build prototypes of what you design on a whiteboard.
• Help to turn some of what you prototype into mature software solutions by working to transitioning ownership to product and ops teams.
• Create something that performs a major social good, helping those who may currently lack identify, be unbanked, or have limited access to the internet
• Collaborate with open source communities and standards bodies..

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU

• You have relevant coding skills and coding skills gained via formal education, and/or demonstrated experience building large scale resilient distributed systems, including systems that emphasize the edge, incorporating IoT devices, smart cards, mesh networking, NFC, RFID and other technologies that work offline
• You have experience with elastic systems, and deep understanding of network and gossip protocols, consensus algorithms, high resilience, data consistency and availability at scale.
• Also, you have experience in the domains of identity and/or currency and/or payments or banking, working closely with cryptographers and backend engineers, both at company and global community levels.
• You are a creative self-starter who is not stymied by ambiguity.
• You are a good communicator — talking/presenting/writing and listening.
• You are comfortable to work in a fuzzy problem space, and enjoy translating initial experiments into requirements, and map to system view.
• You have a positive, can-do attitude, you bring new ideas and you are a fast learner
• You’re fluent in English (French is an asset).

We offer an exciting and challenging role, with great potential for personal development within a unique organization in a fascinating and fast-growing industry. Your file will be handled with upmost confidentiality and discretion.