Who we are

Phoenix R&D is a European messaging technology company founded in 2022. We, the team behind it, have been active in the area of secure messaging in both industry and academia for over 10 years.

As a remote-first company, Phoenix R&D is headquartered in Berlin, where we regularly meet and where we are embedded in a community of cryptographers, open-source software enthusiasts, information security professionals, journalists, and activists.

What we do

Our goal is to define and build an open technological foundation for the next generation of privacy-preserving messaging applications.

We are co-authors of the new internet standard Messaging Layer Security (MLS) which is at the core of our research and development around secure messaging. We are founding members of various IETF working groups, where we collaborate with like-minded parties from academia and industry to develop internet standards with privacy and security in mind.

Among other things, we are working on a modern messaging application for a range of target groups. To reach and empower as many developers and users as possible, the technology we develop is open-source, focusing on thorough documentation and user-friendliness. Our explicit goal is to develop a community of contributors and users that helps us build the next generation of private and secure messaging.

What we are about

We are driven by the belief that technology should serve a meaningful purpose, be fun to use, safe and secure, and free and accessible to people. We favor shared, analyzed standards over home-brewed solutions, open protocols over silos controlled by a small number of entities, and open-source software over proprietary code.

We strive to cultivate an environment of respect and open communication that allows everyone involved to feel safe and to speak their mind, both of which are especially important when working primarily remotely.

We believe diversity is an asset and aim to build a team of people from different backgrounds. In particular, we encourage people from groups that are typically underrepresented in the technology space to apply.

We recognize that to achieve excellence in what we do, we need room to grow both personally and professionally. Our goal is to create an environment of collaboration and sharing of expertise and experience, as well as self-dependent work.

Tasks

We are looking for a freelance senior Rust engineer to help us build an application that uses the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol for end-to-end encryption of data streams.

Concretely, you will implement a full-stack specification in Rust with a strong focus on robustness and test coverage.

Requirements

You have written and deployed software to a production environment
You have extensive experience with Rust
You have experience working with networking protocols
No expertise in security/cryptography is required, but you are curious and willing to expand your knowledge in this area
You are familiar with setting up and maintaining CI/CD systems
You have great communication skills
You live in a place that is compatible with meetings during European working hours

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