What are the responsibilities and job description for the Spiral Bitcoin Wizard position at Afterpay?
Spiral is the first free and open-source, not-for-profit bitcoin organization within a major tech company. In this case, that company is Block, Inc.
Spiral contributes to bitcoin by writing code, supplying grants to open-source projects and individuals, educating, entertaining, and testing the limits of what a small team can do to impact the future of money. Although many see bitcoin only as digital gold, Spiral also envisions bitcoin living up to its potential as the global standard for peer-to-peer payments.
The Role
We’re looking to hire a third Bitcoin Wizard to join our team. This position is for a highly technical, forward-thinking engineer who is able to do deep bitcoin research and development.
Spiral’s Bitcoin Wizards are deeply familiar with the bitcoin protocol, including its history, nuances, and implementation. They study bleeding-edge technical bitcoin proposals and disseminate them to the Spiral team and broader developer community. Each Bitcoin Wizard specializes in a specific aspect of bitcoin technology related to security, decentralization, privacy, scaling, and expressivity. They drive projects stemming from their area of expertise.
Currently, one of our Bitcoin Wizards is focused on ways to improve L2 security and the UX of mempool policy. Our second Bitcoin Wizard is hyper-focused on privacy, research theories, and protocol designs related to decentralized CoinJoins and rust-payjoin.
Bitcoin Wizards have tremendous freedom to choose their areas of focus and should include these along with their application (some examples are listed at the end).
You Will
- Propose protocol improvements or new, innovative ideas that benefit bitcoin
- Continuously develop and execute a plan for a project proposed in your application
- Apply novel cryptography, build prototypes, write production code, run tests, create simulations, and establish performance benchmarks
- Recruit collaborators, co-authors, and peer feedback
- Engage with the broader community and obtain developer consensus
- Review bitcoin-dev and lightning-dev emails, delving forum, “wizards” IRC channel, Bitcoin Optech, relevant research papers, and R&D from other cryptocurrency projects
- Lead a study club for Spiral employees who want to explore technical proposals and ideas related to bitcoin, such as covenants, scaling UTXO sharing, and privacy
- Publish learnings for the benefit of the broader dev ecosystem
You Have
- 12 years of professional experience
- Deep technical understanding of bitcoin
- Proven history of collaboration
- A research and engineering mindset
- Willingness to learn
- Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments and be self-directed
- An ego-free attitude and willingness to detach from a particular proposal if it is decided to be untenable
How to Apply
In addition to submitting an application via this page, shoot us an email with three project ideas you might want to work on along with supporting evidence that you’ll complete them: apply@spiral.xyz
Below are examples of innovative scaling, security, privacy, and expressivity projects that Spiral would find valuable from a Bitcoin Wizard. Again, we expect candidates to determine which projects they will work on, so this list is merely a tool to help them get a sense of what we’re looking for.
- New methods to share UTXOs among users as trustlessly and efficiently as possible
- Lightning efficiency innovation
- Cross-input signature aggregation
- BIP324
- Mining pool decentralization
- Threshold signatures for LN
- Mempool/bitcoin p2p security for L2
- Evaluation of bitcoin security tasks stemming from MEV, tokens, stablecoins, etc.
- Applied ZKP for LN gossip to hide UTXO funding
- Bitcoin script opcode innovation, tradeoff evaluation, and driving (CTV, CSFS, TLUV, CAT, OP_VAULT, etc.)
Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may be modified in the future.
Zone A:
Every benefit we offer is designed with one goal: empowering you to do the best work of your career while building the life you want. Remote work, medical insurance, flexible time off, retirement savings plans, and modern family planning are just some of our offering.
Block, Inc. (NYSE: XYZ) builds technology to increase access to the global economy. Each of our brands unlocks different aspects of the economy for more people. Square makes commerce and financial services accessible to sellers. Cash App is the easy way to spend, send, and store money. Afterpay is transforming the way customers manage their spending over time. TIDAL is a music platform that empowers artists to thrive as entrepreneurs. Bitkey is a simple self-custody wallet built for bitcoin. Proto is a suite of bitcoin mining products and services. Together, we’re helping build a financial system that is open to everyone.
Salary : $447,350 - $736,650
