# Research Engineer

**Location:** Fully remote
**Compensation:** Competitive, paid in fiat or stablecoin

Umbo is building a new kind of margin and infrastructure layer for crypto — combining rollups, proof systems, and DeFi into something that actually matches how serious traders and strategies operate. We’re looking for a research engineer who wants to own the technical foundations of that stack.

This is a hands-on, high-autonomy role: you’ll design the architecture, guide its implementation, and become the in-house authority on all things ZK / proofs / rollups for Umbo.

## What you’ll do

### First 6 Months

Your first 6 months are focused on defining, validating, and shaping the technical direction of the Umbo rollup—from high-level design exploration to practical implementation guidance. You will:

Explore and evaluate TEE-based, zkVM/zkEVM-based, and hybrid designs for Umbo’s rollup, balancing technical viability, security assumptions, performance, and business requirements.

Produce clear architectural proposals, frameworks, and trade-off documents that drive internal decision-making.

Translate chosen designs into actionable engineering paths and guide the team through early implementation phases, ensuring correctness, coherence, and alignment with the broader system (L1 core margin, Dojima, external perp venues, L1 lending).

Continuously refine the architecture as new constraints and opportunities emerge, evolving the system in real time as you learn from implementation and product needs.

Gradually become the internal source of truth for how Umbo’s systems work and why they’re designed this way—both at a conceptual level and at a protocol/implementation level.

### Ongoing

Serve as the domain expert on proofs, ZK systems, cryptography, bridging, and rollup architecture.

Make reliable judgment calls on protocol risks, proof systems, security assumptions, and long-term technical direction.

Educate and up-level the wider team: explain design constraints, adversarial models, failure modes, and how to reason about proofs and correctness.

Review major protocol upgrades, integrations, and new product features for technical soundness.

Continually push Umbo’s technical roadmap forward by identifying opportunities for simplification, performance gains, and architectural improvements.

## What we’re looking for

### Technical background

You don’t need to have done *all* of these, but you should be strong in several and comfortable reasoning about the rest.

* Hands-on experience with at least one of:

* Implementing a zkVM or zkEVM,
* Building or operating an Ethereum L2 / rollup,
* Designing or implementing a ZK-based bridge,
* Writing non-trivial circuits (Halo2/Plonk/STARK tooling, etc.),
* zkVM development (instruction set design, proving performance, I/O).
* Strong engineering background in:

* **Rust** (for prover, node, circuit, or systems work),
* **Solidity** (or equivalent) for L1/L2 contract work,
* Ethereum / EVM internals (state, gas, storage, precompiles, call patterns).
* Comfort working with:

* Rollup architectures (optimistic, zk, validium/hybrid),
* Bridge models and cross-chain messaging,
* Data availability trade-offs.
* Ability to move between “research mode” and “shipping mode”:

* Read docs / specs and extract what actually matters,
* Turn that into concrete, testable designs,
* Help debug real systems when they don’t behave like the paper.

### How you work

This role is **high ownership** and **self-directed** by design.

* You have a strong internal **locus of control**:

* You default to “what can *I* do to move this forward?”
* You don’t wait for someone to hand you a roadmap.
* You’re comfortable **setting your own plan and KPIs**:

* Propose your own milestones for the first 3–6 months,
* Adjust them as reality hits, but keep yourself accountable.
* You communicate a lot, not a little:

* Fully remote means you over-communicate:

* Docs,
* Status updates,
* Design notes, trade-off writeups.
* You’re proactive in sharing progress and concerns, not reactive.
* You can explain complex things simply:

* You can talk proofs and adversarial models with engineers,
* And explain “what this means in practice” to product, design and non-technical teammates.

## What we offer

* **Fully remote** – work from wherever you’re most effective.
* **Compensation** – competitive, paid in **fiat or stablecoins**, depending on your preference and jurisdiction.
* A chance to **design the core architecture** of a system that never existed before

* A small team that actually wants to understand your arguments and is willing to route the roadmap around them if they’re strong.

You don’t need a perfect, polished CV. We care a lot more about your drive, the systems you’ve actually built, and how you’d approach Umbo’s stack than whether your resume ticks every box.

If interested, please send a DM [here](https://x.com/UMBO_Finance)