Developer Relations Engineer - Interchain GmbH

Interchain GmbH is a 13-person company which works on core blockchain technology. We are based in Berlin, but our team stretches from New York City to Ulyanovsk, Russia. We keep in touch through Slack and Zoom, and get together in person periodically (when COVID permits).

One of our company’s responsibilities is improving developer relations within the Cosmos Network and the wider IBC connected Internet of Blockchains. We are pretty flexible with the definition of “developer relations” and generally think of it as anything that improves a new developer’s understanding of the admittedly complicated world of blockchains.

Generally this takes the form of tutorials, blog posts, workshops, presentations, documentation and supporting users in our community channels. We’re looking for someone who can get creative with ways to reach our audience of builders and who can take initiative on more adventurous ideas, whether they be proof-of-concept applications or anything that sparks interest and curiosity in our products. The Cosmos ecosystem also includes a number of ambitious teams who push our software to its limits. As part of this role, you’ll be working with some of the best projects in the industry, understanding their needs and supporting them through public chat channels, calls, code reviews, pointing them to existing resources, or writing how-to posts—anything that makes synthesizing the broad scope of Cosmos related technologies more readily available.

Because we are a small company, our employees sometimes wear more than one hat. The Developer Relations department currently consists of two people who double as the Grants and Funding department. They help evaluate funding proposals for the Interchain Foundation, a Swiss non-profit dedicated to supporting the research and creation of secure decentralized technology and the networks that deploy it like Cosmos. You may be asked from time to time to evaluate a specific project or technology, or be the first to try out the results from cutting edge teams shaping the future of our industry.

While the Cosmos ecosystem touches on many projects and technologies that enrich the vision of an Internet of Blockchains, there are some core products that we are especially dedicated to supporting. The three main ones are:

• Cosmos SDK
  • Our flagship blockchain development framework built in Golang that allows complete control of your blockchain from the ground up
  • It is a modular framework like Ruby-on-Rails that allows you to import a variety of features from external sources
• Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC)
  • TCP-IP for blockchains, a protocol for communication between independent consensus state machines, gluing together the Internet of Blockchains
• Tendermint Core
  • The gold standard for BFT consensus and Proof of Stake

We don’t have any specific criteria regarding previous experience, but we're looking for candidates who ideally have:

• Passion and curiosity for emerging technologies. This is an exciting sector of technology and your enthusiasm should be infectious as you seek out new information and work towards synthesizing it for others.
• Creative thinking. “Dermis and feline can be divorced by manifold methods”
• Clarity of thought in written and spoken language. It will be important for you to be able to answer questions like “How does it work?” and “Why does it matter?” in a way that is accessible to people just entering the space.
• Generalist programming experience. A lot of the work you’ll be doing is directly related to onboarding users to the Cosmos SDK. This is a Golang framework so experience in that language would be helpful in this task. However the role will include jumping into a wide variety of codebases in an assortment of languages. Having a broad level of general experience will be more valuable than any deep domain-specific knowledge. There’s a list of many of these topics later on.
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership. You finish what you start and keep a high standard of quality. You take pride in your work.
• A home base within our working timezones. You are probably based in a timezone between UTC-5:00 (New York) and UTC+3:00 (Moscow).

Your position will put you in contact with a large list of topics. We hope this is especially exciting for you and anticipate the opportunity to be engaged with many of the following areas:

• Advanced Cryptography, Networking and Blockchain concepts
  • Prediction Markets
  • Zero Knowledge Proofs
  • Optimistic Rollups
  • Automated Market Makers
  • Non-Fungible Tokens
  • Consensus algorithms, like Paxos, Raft, or PBFT
  • P2P systems
• Open source maintainership and governance
  • Protocol standards inside and outside of the blockchain space
  • DAOs
  • Git & Github
• Modern Web Development
  • Frontend Frameworks like React and Vue
  • Backend Frameworks like RoR and Laravel
  • Microservices
  • Apache and NGINX
  • DNS & SSL
  • Docker
  • GraphQL / REST / RPC / gRPC
• Broad range of scripting languages and programming environments
  • Golang
  • Rust
  • Haskell
  • Javascript / Typescript / AssemblyScript
  • Solidity / Vyper / EVM
  • WebAssembly (WASM)
• Decentralized Storage Solutions
  • IPFS
  • Dat Protocol
  • BitTorrent
  • SSB

Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with most of these topics: These are just some examples of the technologies you might come across, and although previous exposure is helpful, we’re looking for people who are passionate and curious above all else.

Not sure if you're a fit? Please feel free to apply anyways, and we'll take it from there.

Interchain GmbH believes that great people come from a broad range of backgrounds, and that the diversity of our team is one of our strengths. Discrimination has no place at Interchain GmbH and we do not discriminate on the bases of race, color, gender, gender identity, national origin, age, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. We are committed to fighting bias and discrimination in our workplace and in our communities.