Senior ZK Engineer

About Us

Babylon Labs is building native use cases for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an incredible store of value, but it’s historically been difficult to unlock its broader economic productivity. Our flagship protocol, trustless Bitcoin staking, has attracted almost $6 billion native BTC TVL, and our new invention, trustless Bitcoin vault, allows native BTC to participate in DeFi protocols on any chain.

About the Job

We’re looking for a Senior ZK‑Engineer focused on SP1 development to power our trustless Bitcoin vaults and zk light‑client infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain SP1‑based zero‑knowledge components supporting trustless Bitcoin vaults and zk light‑client flows.
• Own architecture for zkVM usage: circuit/program decomposition, I/O design, proving/verification pipelines, and performance budgets.
• Deliver a zkVM component to production within the first six months.
• Build and support zk light‑client infrastructure and integrate it into the product stack.
• Establish testing and quality practices: property‑based tests, fuzz/invariant testing, determinism checks, benchmarking, and CI.
• Collaborate daily with the product team to scope, prioritize, and ship features end‑to‑end.
• Produce clear technical documentation and operational runbooks.
• Track relevant security/cryptography and ZK research, assess impact, propose mitigations, and drive roll‑forward plans.
• Apply security measures across zkVM programs and integrations: threat modeling, constraint/program audits.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in Rust.
• Track record shipping zero‑knowledge systems or infrastructure to production.
• Significant hands‑on experience with SP1 and zkVMs.
• Solid understanding of zkSNARK and zkSTARK systems and their trade‑offs.
• Expertise in systems design and performance optimization for proving and verification paths.
• Self‑driven, collaborative, comfortable operating in fast‑moving, ambiguous environments.
• Individual contributor mindset at senior level with high ownership and output.