Staff / Principal Cryptographer (IC)

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.

About us

The company is the digital-asset custody and infrastructure platform for the GCC. We hold institutional crypto safely, settle transactions across chains, and expose all of that as a developer API and a regulated-grade institutional console.

Why this role exists

A custody platform either trusts its MPC scheme or it should not exist. We have shipped a working TSS stack with the founding engineering team. We now need a research-grade specialist to own scheme selection, audit response, signing-protocol evolution, post-quantum readiness, and the cryptographic hard-facts of the platform from the inside. This is not a generic blockchain engineer who applies primitives. This is a practicing cryptographer who designs them, reviews them, and ships them.

The role

• You will own the cryptographic core of Company’s custody platform:
• Scheme ownership. Select, justify, and evolve the MPC / TSS scheme family we run in production (CGGMP21, FROST, GG18 / GG20, lattice variants, future post-quantum threshold schemes).
• Protocol reviews. Author and shepherd scheme-review documents. Sit in audit conversations with Trail of Bits, NCC Group, Zellic, or equivalent.
• Production implementation. 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.
• Incident response. When a paper, advisory, or competitor disclosure changes our threat model, you write the response and propose the fix.
• External representation. Speak at IACR venues, RWC, Real World MPC, ZKProof. Publish work that the company allows you to publish.
• Internal teaching. Lift the cryptographic literacy of the engineering organization. Run paper-reading sessions. Mentor IC engineers who want to grow into cryptographic specializations.
• You are not the entire cryptography team. You are the first dedicated cryptographer. Inside 18 to 24 months we expect to grow this function to a small team and you will hire the next people.

Must-haves

• 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. You have implemented it, not just read the paper.

• Production code in Rust or Go. Not just research code. Mainline branches that hold real customer assets.

Public technical artifact. 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. You 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-haves

• 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.
• This is not the right role if
• "Blockchain engineer" with no published cryptography work. Wrong specialism.
• ZK-only background with no MPC / TSS experience. We touch ZK in narrow places but the core function is threshold signing.
• 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.

Originally posted on Himalayas