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Institute of Free TechnologyIT

Decentralised Messaging Engineer - Rust

The Institute of Free Technology (IFT) is a mission-driven tech startup studio that supports the development of open-source projects focused on safeguarding civil liberties in the digital age. They provide financial, technical, legal, and operational support to a portfolio of projects including Status, Logos, and Waku.

Institute of Free Technology

Employee count: 201-500

GB and US only

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Logos Messaging Team

The Logos Messaging team is focused on creating communication infrastructure for a freer internet — permissionless, interoperable, and based on user consent. We're building toward a world where anyone can reach anyone on a network that no single entity controls or can take away. We cannot afford to compromise on Privacy, and "Eventual Decentralisation" is not an option.

Right now we're deep in the hard problems: Bringing decentralised group messaging over MLS to all developers. This is frontier tech work — the protocols we're writing don't have established playbooks, and the tradeoffs we're navigating haven't all been mapped yet.

This is where you come in. We're a small team seeking engineers who have a passion for decentralised chat and who've thought deeply about how these systems work, where they fail, and what it takes to get them right. You'll work directly on our SDK and contribute to the protocols underneath it, with real ownership over work that enables open communication.

Key responsibilities

  • Implement our messaging protocols in our reference SDK, translating protocol specs into reliable, production-quality Rust
  • Own the API design and developer experience of the SDK surface — abstractions, ergonomics, and developer-facing documentation
  • Contribute to messaging protocol specifications alongside the team
  • As a member of a small team, you'll wear many hats — picking up problems outside your immediate lane, learning as you go, and growing with the team
  • Write clear technical documentation and participate in async design discussions with collaborators across the project

You will ideally have

  • Deep familiarity with real-world instant messaging systems - you've worked on, contributed to, or spent serious time understanding how systems like Signal, Matrix, XMPP, or similar are built, where they make tradeoffs, and where they struggle
  • Experience with decentralised computing - peer-to-peer systems, distributed networks, or decentralised application infrastructure
  • Comfort working directly with cryptographic primitives - signatures, ciphers, and key exchanges and an understanding of secure private messaging principles such as forward secrecy, post-compromise security, and key management
  • Solid Rust experience: comfortable writing reliable, maintainable code in a team setting
  • Previous experience with Web3, blockchains, open protocols, and the values that underpin them
  • A strong alignment to our principles: https://logos.co/manifesto/

Bonus points

  • Experience with Post-Quantum Cryptography and its application to secure messaging
  • Experience with MLS (Message Layer Security / RFC 9420) or the OpenMLS library specifically
  • You've authored or contributed to an open specification
  • Familiarity with P2P transport layers such as Waku or libp2p
  • Experience working for an open source organisation
  • Comfortable working remotely and asynchronously

Don't worry if you don't meet all of these criteria — we'd still love to hear from you if you think you'd be a great fit. Just explain why in your cover letter.

Hiring process

Interview with our Talent team

Interview with Team Member (Technical Life Story)

Interview with Team Lead / Pair Programming Session (Technical Discussion )

Interview with Program Lead (Culture Fit)

Compensation

The expected compensation range for this role is negotiable, dependent on how we assess your skills and experience throughout our interview process. We are happy to pay in any mix of fiat/crypto.

About the job

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Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Location requirements

Hiring timezones

United Kingdom +/- 0 hours, and 1 other timezone

About Institute of Free Technology

Learn more about Institute of Free Technology and their company culture.

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We are the Institute of Free Technology (IFT), a mission-driven tech startup studio that emerged from Status, which we, Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, founded in 2017. Our initial goal with Status was to enable the free flow of information and protect the right to private, secure conversations. However, as we delved deeper, we recognized gaps in the existing infrastructure needed to fully realize these values. This realization led to an expansion of our project's scope and ultimately, the formation of IFT and the startups it now incubates. Our core mission is to support the development, adoption, and accessibility of solutions to digital age problems. We are guided by a strong set of principles: liberty, censorship resistance, security, privacy, and inclusivity. We actively seek to connect with and support innovators who are dedicated to defending our digital rights.

At IFT, we provide comprehensive support to take ideas from the drawing board to market. This includes financial backing, technical expertise, legal guidance, people operations, and brand-building assistance at every stage. We empower our startups to concentrate on their core strength: building public goods designed to safeguard civil liberties in the digital age. Our portfolio of open source projects is continually growing and currently includes prominent names like Status, Logos, Codex, Waku, Nimbus, Nomos, and Keycard. As a team, IFT has been completely distributed since its inception. We boast a strong core of over 220 contributors from diverse backgrounds, spread across the globe. We are deeply passionate about open source, and our organizational structure reflects this with minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours. We champion a high degree of autonomy, encouraging our team members to work independently while aligning with the organization's overarching priorities.

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at Institute of Free Technology.

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Co-working space

Access to co-working spaces is provided.

Unlimited vacation

We offer unlimited vacation to our contributors.

Entirely remote

Our team is completely distributed since inception.

Flexible working hours

Our organizational structure has minimal hierarchy and no fixed work hours.

View Institute of Free Technology's employee benefits
Claim this profileInstitute of Free Technology logoIT

Institute of Free Technology

Company size

201-500 employees

Founded in

2017

Chief executive officer

Jarrad Hope, Carl Bennetts

Employees live in

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