Frontend Engineer

Job Description
Penumbra brings privacy to proof-of-stake, allowing users to transact, stake, swap, and marketmake without disclosing their personal information, account activity, or trading strategies to the entire world – while still permitting selective disclosure to appropriate parties. Working at Penumbra Labs is a unique opportunity to work on exciting problems and build new financial infrastructure, and offers a collaborative work environment and a meaningful stake in the creation of a new protocol.
Role:
We are seeking a talented Frontend Engineer to join our team and play a crucial role in building a best-in-class user experience for our web interfaces and creating external web developer tooling. As a Frontend Engineer, you will be at the forefront of translating protocol API’s into intuitive interfaces. Your work will directly impact the usability and adoption of Penumbra, as well as enable third-party developers to build on top of our platform.
The right candidate will drive interface development and the evolution of our web capabilities for our ecosystem—all the while documenting learnings and relaying feedback to core protocol developers. Further, the role will work very closely with design to bring new UIs and components to life. This role sits at the intersection of web engineering, UI development, and ecosystem tooling.
Must have:
- Expertise in modern web development technology stack. We use Typescript, React, Zustand, TailwindCSS, TurboRepo, Zod, Radix UI, gRPC, protobufs, & web assembly.
- Proficiency in writing type-safe code in Typescript, writing generics, working within strict-mode, and minimizing use of any’s.
- Familiarity with testing frameworks like Jest/Vitest & writing high-coverage code.
- Understanding of frontend performance optimization: lazy loading, code splitting, optimizing static assets, using web workers.
- Knowledge of web UI and UX design principles
- Soft skills: Good communication, problem-solving skills, and a capacity for working with internal and external teams
- Strong grasp of system design and ability to learn how different layers of the Penumbra and Cosmos stack interact
Nice to have:
- Experience with Chrome extension development and service workers.
- Experience with blockchain systems and understanding of web 3 development patterns
- Familiarity with applied cryptographic technologies
- Experience with Cosmos SDK and/or Tendermint
- Experience with Rust and WebAssembly/wasm-pack
- Experience contributing to open source projects and communities
Who you are
You have the aforementioned engineering and collaboration skills.
You’ll be working in our nascent frontend and interfaces stack from day one. You are a frontend and web-stack expert with an interest in blockchains and Rust.
You have strong skills for public, asynchronous, remote work
Penumbra Labs is a remote organization, building in public. You should have excellent written and verbal communication skills to coordinate with and make your work legible to the rest of the team and – as the project grows – to outside collaborators and stakeholders.
You’re excited to build the systems you want to see in the world
You’ll be building new, decentralized infrastructure for economic coordination. You should be interested in thinking about how the systems you’re building reflect your values, and you should be excited about the challenge of trying to build solutions, not just analyze problems.
How to apply
Apply using the form with:
1. your name and pronouns,
2. your resume/cv,
3. a brief description of your interest in the role,
4. a sample or description of your technical work.
This sample could be public links to code you’ve written, or, if your best work has happened behind closed doors, it can be a description of what you built in enough detail for us to understand it.
Company Overview
Penumbra is a private-by-default proof-of-stake network. Penumbra provides private transactions in any kind of cryptoasset, using Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) to connect to other chains. It also has a novel staking mechanism that provides accountability for validators but privacy for delegators, allowing them to privately stake, earn rewards, and participate in governance. Finally, Penumbra provides ZSwap, a decentralized exchange integrated with its shielded pool. ZSwap provides sealed-bid batch auctions on the market-taker side and Uniswap-v3-style concentrated liquidity on the market-maker side. Sealed-bid batch auctions prevent frontrunning, provide better execution, and reveal only the net flow across a pair of assets in each block, and liquidity positions are created anonymously, allowing traders to approximate their desired trading function without revealing their individual beliefs about prices.