Staff / Principal Cryptographer (IC)
Strattmont
WorldwideremotePosted 14 days ago
Skill Required
CryptographyApplied-CryptographyMPC-TSS-EngineeringCryptographic-Protocol-DesignSecurity-ResearchCryptography-SpecialistPrincipal-Crypto-EngineerCryptographerCryptography-EngineerCryptographic-EngineerCryptographic-Systems-ExpertCryptography-ArchitectCryptography-ExpertCryptographic-Protocol-EngineerCryptography-ResearcherSOCEngineeringBlockchainSoliditywrittenISO 27001andGoFulltime
Key highlights
- Remote-friendly globally (UTC-3 to UTC+5 for working overlap)
- Full-time Individual Contributor
- Must have 8-plus years applied cryptography practice with 4+ years threshold signing/MPC/secret sharing in production at a regulated entity
- Must have production code in Rust or Go holding real customer assets
- Must have been through one regulated-audit cycle as cryptography-side owner (SOC 2, NYDFS DFS Part 500, FCA, MAS, VARA, OCC, FINMA, or equivalent)
- Growing to a small team in 18-24 months, with responsibility for hiring next people
Role overview
The company is a digital-asset custody and infrastructure platform for the GCC, holding institutional crypto safely, settling transactions across chains, and exposing all of that as a developer API and a regulated-grade institutional console. This role is for a research-grade cryptographic specialist who will own scheme selection, audit response, signing-protocol evolution, post-quantum readiness, and the cryptographic hard-facts of the platform. The position sits within a small growing team; inside 18-24 months the role will grow to include hiring additional cryptographers.
Responsibilities
- Own the cryptographic core of Company's custody platform
- Select, justify, and evolve the MPC / TSS scheme family run in production (CGGMP21, FROST, GG18 / GG20, lattice variants, future post-quantum threshold schemes)
- Author and shepherd scheme-review documents
- Sit in audit conversations with Trail of Bits, NCC Group, Zellic, or equivalent
- Read and write Rust and Go cryptographic code
- Pair with the custody engineering team on signing-service performance, share generation, key rotation, and recovery flows
- Write the response and propose the fix when a paper, advisory, or competitor disclosure changes the threat model
- Speak at IACR venues, RWC, Real World MPC, ZKProof
- Publish work that the company allows you to publish
- Lift the cryptographic literacy of the engineering organization
- Run paper-reading sessions
- Mentor IC engineers who want to grow into cryptographic specializations
- Hire the next people when growing the function to a small team inside 18 to 24 months
Requirements
- 8-plus years of applied cryptography practice, with at least 4 years on threshold signing, MPC, secret sharing, or related primitives shipped in production at a regulated entity
- Hands-on with at least one of: GG18, GG20, FROST, CGGMP21, DKLs23, BLS threshold, lattice-based threshold (Raccoon, Sparkle, equivalent), or a comparable scheme family. Implemented it, not just read the paper
- Production code in Rust or Go. Not just research code. Mainline branches that hold real customer assets
- At minimum one of: an IACR ePrint, RWC / CRYPTO / EUROCRYPT / ASIACRYPT talk, a maintainer role on an open-source MPC library (cggmp21, multi-party-ecdsa, ZKP libraries, lattice libraries, equivalent), or a public scheme-review writeup
- Has been through one regulated-audit cycle as the cryptography-side owner. SOC 2, NYDFS DFS Part 500, FCA, MAS, VARA, OCC, FINMA, or equivalent
- Communicates research clearly to engineers who are not cryptographers. Can write a one-page explainer of a primitive that a Senior IC will internalize in 30 minutes
- English fluency. Written and verbal
Nice to have
- PhD in cryptography from a recognized program
- Co-authorship on a paper that has been cited by a deployed system you can point to
- Experience reviewing or contributing to NIST submissions (post-quantum signature competition, multi party threshold cryptography call)
- Open-source maintainer credentials on cggmp21, multi-party-ecdsa, libthreshold, mpc-lib, FRESCO, sl crypto, dkls23, or equivalent
- Has co-designed a scheme that was implemented by a third party
- Comfort with lattice cryptography and post-quantum threshold variants
Additional details
- Company: X
- Location: Remote-friendly globally (UTC-3 to UTC+5 for working overlap)
- Reports to: Head of Engineering (once hired). Co-Founder / CTO
- Type: Full-time. Individual Contributor
- This is not the right role if: 'Blockchain engineer' with no published cryptography work. Wrong specialism. ZK-only background with no MPC / TSS experience. Hash-and-sign Solidity developer with no protocol-level cryptography depth. Founder of a failed Layer-1 chain looking for a Chief Scientist seat. Currently subject to a non-compete that blocks custody / MPC work for more than 6 months.