Quantum Cryptography Engineer

Job description

ABOUT MOVE INDUSTRIES Move Industries is building the People’s Chain, a Move-based Layer 1 blockchain, and a diverse ecosystem that empowers talented builders to create the future of finance, infrastructure, and real-world value on chain. As a core contributor to the Movement Network, we combine deep protocol engineering with open community governance, returning blockchain to its roots by giving financial power, access and opportunity back to the people. OUR MISSION Our mission is to fuel the next generation of secure, expressive, and high-performance blockchain applications through the Move programming language and scalable distributed systems. You will help unlock massive throughput, low latency, and resilience across consensus, data availability, and privacy - the invisible rails that make an open and decentralized future possible. THE ROLE - We are seeking a Cryptography Engineer to lead our post-quantum security strategy and own the cryptographic foundations of the Movement Network. - This is a research-meets-production role. You will design, analyze, and ship the primitives that secure consensus, accounts, randomness, and bridges - with a particular focus on making the network resilient to quantum adversaries. You will own the migration path from classical primitives (Ed25519, BLS, Schnorr) to post-quantum and hybrid schemes, and define the cryptographic posture of an L1 that is intended to outlive the cryptographically relevant quantum computer. - We approach this work with the seriousness it deserves. Bad cryptography fails silently, sometimes for years, and on a public chain those failures are irreversible. We are looking for someone who treats correctness, side channels, and proof artifacts as first-class deliverables - not afterthoughts. - This is not a research-only role, and not a pure-implementation role. You will read papers, write specifications, and ship code that runs on every node in the network. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Lead the post-quantum cryptography roadmap: signatures, KEMs, threshold schemes, hybrid migration, and crypto-agility - Design and implement cryptographic primitives in Rust - lattice-based (ML-KEM, ML-DSA / Dilithium), hash-based (SLH-DSA, XMSS, LMS), and hybrid constructions combining classical and PQ schemes - Re-architect or hybridize core protocol primitives (Ed25519, BLS, Schnorr) with quantum-resistant analogues without regressing on latency, signature size, or throughput - Design crypto-agility into the protocol from day one: key rotation, algorithm negotiation, in-place migration paths that don’t require destructive hard forks - Build threshold, aggregate, and multi-signature schemes for validator consensus, including post-quantum-friendly variants - Own randomness: distributed key generation (DKG), verifiable random functions (VRFs), and post-quantum-secure leader election - Contribute to zero-knowledge primitives - account abstraction, privacy, succinct proofs - with a preference for post-quantum-friendly proof systems (STARKs, lattice-based SNARKs) - Audit cryptographic code, write formal specifications, and partner with verification efforts (Move Prover, EasyCrypt, F*, Cryptol) - Engage with academic partners, NIST PQC standardization, and the broader cryptography community; publish where appropriate - Document threat models, security assumptions, and migration timelines so the rest of engineering can build confidently on top WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Deep working knowledge of modern cryptography: signatures, KEMs, hash functions, ZK proofs, threshold schemes, MPC - Strong familiarity with the post-quantum landscape - lattice cryptography (LWE, Module-LWE, NTRU), hash-based signatures, code-based schemes, and the security/performance trade-offs between them - Track record of implementing cryptographic primitives in production code (Rust strongly preferred; C/C++ acceptable for systems-level work) - Ability to read an IACR paper on Friday and have a correct, constant-time prototype by Monday - Strong understanding of: - Provable security, reduction proofs, and the gap between security models and real-world systems - Side channels, timing attacks, and constant-time implementation discipline - Consensus protocols and where cryptography lives inside them (signatures, randomness, accumulators, commitments) - Performance trade-offs: signature size, verification cost, batchability, aggregation - Bias toward shipping: papers are inputs, working code is the output - Care for long-term impact - you are designing primitives that may be securing user funds in 2040 PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - PhD or equivalent research experience in cryptography, or a strong publication record at IACR venues (CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT, TCC, PKC, RWC, CCS, S&P) - Contributions to widely-used cryptographic libraries (RustCrypto, arkworks, blst, dalek, libsodium, liboqs, OpenSSL) - Experience with NIST PQC submissions, IETF working groups, or standardization processes - Experience with formal verification of cryptographic code (HACL*, fiat-crypto, Vale, jasmin) - Prior cryptography work on a major blockchain - Aptos, Sui, Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos - especially on randomness, threshold signatures, account abstraction, or zkLogin/Keyless - Experience implementing zkSNARKs, zkSTARKs, or post-quantum-friendly proof systems (FRI, lattice-based commitments) - Production deployment experience with hybrid PQ/classical cryptography (TLS 1.3 hybrid KEMs, signed updates, secure messaging) - Experience with hardware acceleration (AVX2/AVX-512, AArch64 SVE, GPU) for cryptographic workloads WHY JOIN US - Lead a once-in-a-generation migration: take a public L1 from classical to post-quantum security - Work at the rare intersection of cryptographic theory, distributed systems, and production engineering at scale - Direct collaboration with protocol, consensus, and runtime engineers - your designs ship, not sit - Competitive compensation with meaningful upside - Define the cryptographic posture of infrastructure that real applications, real users, and real money depend on - for decades