Systems/Low-Level Engineer - Rust

Project Overview:

Litheum is at the forefront of blockchain innovation, creating a Layer 1 blockchain poised to revolutionize the industry. As a startup in its initial phases, we boast a small, dynamic and global team spanning across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We are pioneering the next wave of Web3 applications, providing global-scale consensus in a straightforward, secure, and cost-effective manner.

Our groundbreaking Proof of Performance consensus model sets us apart, encouraging network nodes—referred to as Farmers—to contribute vital infrastructure such as networking, CPU, and memory. Our vision is ambitious: to facilitate 1 trillion transactions per day at just 10% of the infrastructure costs associated with leading blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum.

We are proud to have some of the most advanced blockchain specialists in the world on our team, making Litheum a prime location for learning and professional growth.

We are building world-class tech and want to work with world-class people. This project is highly ambitious and you will be expected to grow along with this project. As an early team member you’ll be forming the foundation of the Litheum Team and helping define our team culture and best practices.

Bonus Compensation:

Litheum is at an early stage and our resources are limited. This position includes a small base salary but with significant token-based compensation similar to stock options. You will be in the same situation as the rest of the team and we are open to sharing details about this.

Role: Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

As a Systems Engineer your main responsibility will be for developing and maintaining features for LitheumCore. This involves heavily test-driven development. Primary remaining work involves the networking layer, caching, EVM integration, testing, frontend integration, large-scale benchmarking, devops, and deployment.

We practice agile/scrum methodologies and follow Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration best practices.

Required Knowledge/Skills:

You should have very strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms and a solid understanding of computational complexity (Big-O).

You should have strong abilities at Linux sysadmin: vim or emacs, nginx config, systemd, containerization, bash/zsh, awk or python or similar.

Your desktop should run Linux or MacOS.

Strong knowledge of low-level networking and systems operations, caching, I/O, etc. Bonus if you’ve read Beej’s guide to Network Programming.

Solid understanding of the async revolution and its interplay with I/O, i.e. you should understand why asynchronous programming has taken over. Bonus if you know c10k and c10m.

You should know the following names: ESR, K&R, Ryan Dahl, Joel Spolsky, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Donald Knuth.

You should understand string encoding and know the difference between a C string and a Pascal string.

You should know POSIX and the following terminology: socket, pipe, file descriptor, functions as first-class objects, hypervisor, L1 cache, malloc, I/O, hash, interrupts, lock-free data structures.

You should have basic knowledge of asymmetric cryptography and one-way functions.

Required Tech

Rust, C, Python/Awk or similar

Git/Github, Linux sysadmin (bash/zsh, nginx, systemd, etc)

Bonus Tech/Skills

Javascript, Dart, Solidity, C++, HTML/CSS, Protobufs

Containerization

Blockchain knowledge

Next Steps for Litheum:

We are on the cusp of exciting developments, including initiating our first funding round, expanding our team, launching a media campaign, applying to top-tier crypto incubator programs, and aiming for an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in the coming year.

Technical Products and Upcoming Milestones:

We need to develop a DApp demo as soon as possible.

LitheumCore: Our biggest technical project is our reference implementation, LitheumCore, which is written in Rust. It is currently approaching feature-parity with Bitcoin (but scalable).

At the moment we are integrating Rust EVM 1.0 (formerly SputnikVM) so we can support solidity and smart contracts. This is not as simple as other EVM-compatible chains which typically just fork geth, we have a unique consensus. Rust EVM offers unparalleled flexibility and we are proud to be one of the first chains to integrate its new 1.0 major version release.

Metamask Fork: We will soon be forking Metamask to support the Truly Decentralized nature of Litheum. In the context of Litheum, web3js providers can be provided in a much simpler way. Additionally some RPCs may not be available since all data on Litheum is provided by the network itself and some RPCs may be deemed unnecessary and so some small refactors and changes may be needed.

Demo Wallets: We have a demo web wallet in HTML/Javascript and a demo iOS/Andoid wallet written in Flutter. Both leverage the wallet code from the litheum-common via wasm.

IDO Infrastructure: We are planning a highly customized token launch which will require a DApp and ERC20.

Proof of Performance Simulator: In order to validate our consensus design and parameterization, we have developed a simulator which can be used to make predictions about behavior and economics of the Litheum mainnet.

Rust EVM Playground: We maintain a small library for testing solidity contracts and running them in an offline Rust EVM based environment.

The Litheum Team

Clayton Rabenda is the founder/CTO of Litheum. He is a former Senior Engineer at Google and previous head of Engineering for Saito blockchain. He's focused on the state of the blockchain industry, the nature of decentralization, the origins of the scalability dilemma, and the game theory of consensus design. He is interested in educating the blockchain community and raising the conversation to the next level. He believes that decentralization can change the world but that the industry has been facing an existential dilemma since 2017 and that we need to raise the standards of the industry, both technologically and philosophically, to achieve our goals.

Clayton’s co-founder is Philip Johnson, who is a former SVP and Silicon Valley Bank and has spent the last 30 years in the high-tech entrepreneurial space from silicon valley to mainland china and everywhere in between. He’s worked with numerous globally-recognized companies when they were at their earliest stages and advised dozens of startups. Philip’s experience makes him an invaluable advisor to the project and an incredible resource for building relationships both inside and outside the team.

At Litheum, every person is considered a family member and we work as a family toward the same goal. We expect to see that same energy & effort from every member of the clan. We believe we grow & shine together.