Who are we?
IOHK, is a technology company focused on Blockchain research and development. We are renowned for our scientific approach to blockchain development, emphasizing peer-reviewed research and formal methods to ensure security, scalability, and sustainability. Our projects include decentralized finance (DeFi), governance, and identity management, aiming to advance the capabilities and adoption of blockchain technology globally.
We invest in the unknown, applying our curiosity and desire for positive change to everything we do. By fueling creativity, innovation, and progress within our teams, our products and services are designed for people to be fearless, to be changemakers.
About Partner Chains:
IOG’s Partner chains Tribe is an innovation project built using Substrate. It aims to simplify blockchain deployment, operation and interoperability by combining modular technology with proven security, liquidity, and reliability. Partner Chains empowers developers and validators to create optimized blockchains without network or technology stack lock-in, fostering a new era of interoperable and scalable solutions.
What the role involves:
As a Software Engineer in the Partner Chains tribe, you are responsible for writing high-quality code for our products. You have the exciting challenge of working with cutting-edge research and technology with a focus on the market's needs. To support you on this challenge, our products have software architects, product managers, project managers, formal methods specialists and QA test engineers, with whom you must communicate professionally, effectively and efficiently.
- Follow agile software development practices
- Work with teams across multiple time zones
- Work independently on software development tasks
- Be proactive and require minimal supervision or mentoring to complete tasks
- Review specifications produced by architects and formal methods specialists
- Contribute to the design of algorithms
- Write clean, straightforward, efficient code that satisfies previously agreed acceptance criteria and specifications
- Commit often and submit small pull requests frequently
- Cover your code with unit, property, and integration tests when applicable
- Review the pull requests of your teammates
- Fix bugs in your own code and in legacy code from others
- Be available for emergency fixing of severity 1 issues on deployed products
- Integrate software components and third-party libraries
- Verify and deploy programs and systems
- Troubleshoot, debug, and upgrade existing software
- Write documentation for the code
- Write technical user manuals
- Be knowledgeable about distributed and concurrent computation
- Bonus: Be knowledgeable about the basics of cryptography.
Who you are:
- A minimum of 5+ years of development experience
- A minimum of 3+ years of Rust experience
- Experience working with Git
- Practical experience with Agile software development methods
- Knowledge of functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
- Blockchain and/or any blockchain framework experience is a plus
- Blockchain experience is a plus but not critical
- A degree in Computer Science is desirable but not essential
- Experience with communication protocols such as RESTful APIs, gRPC, and/or inter processes communication
- Experience with building reusable and modular software
- Distributed systems and network development
- A track record of delivering software projects from start to finish
- Proficiency in software development best practices, including design, implementation, testing, and debugging
- HTTP API understanding as well as accessibility and security compliance.
- Familiarity with continuous integration and deployment pipelines
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS
- Software development methods such as agile programming and test-driven development
- Write idiomatic code that satisfies the acceptance criteria of a given task
- Write tests (unit tests, property tests) that provide sufficient and non-superfluous efficient code coverage.
- Document code and APIs concisely and unambiguously
- Break down tasks into sub-tasks that are completable in a short amount of time and report completion as required by managers
- Pragmatically adhere to software engineering principles (modularity, incremental development, no premature optimization, no feature creep, no speculative generality, ...)
Substrate Experience (Required)
- Substrate Pallet (FRAME) Development – Proven ability to design, build, and integrate custom pallets from scratch, including defining storage items, dispatchable calls, events, and error handling to deliver robust and unique blockchain business logic.
- Runtime Engineering and Logic – Hands-on experience composing a blockchain runtime by selecting and configuring pre-built pallets (e.g., balances, staking, governance) alongside custom pallets, managing dependencies, and understanding the full execution flow of a block.
- Polkadot Ecosystem Architecture – In-depth understanding of Polkadot’s heterogeneous multichain architecture, with the ability to clearly articulate the distinct roles of the Relay Chain (security and consensus) and Parachains (application-specific logic).
- Forkless Runtime Upgrades – Practical expertise in authoring and executing forkless runtime upgrades, enabling seamless blockchain logic updates without requiring a hard fork.
- Consensus and Finality Gadgets – Strong familiarity with Polkadot’s hybrid consensus model, including BABE (block production) and GRANDPA (finality), and how they work together to secure the network.
- Remote work
- Laptop reimbursement
- New starter package to buy hardware essentials (headphones, monitor, etc)
- Learning & Development opportunities
- Competitive PTO
At IOG, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
