Summary

As a Formal Methods Engineer at IO you act as a bridge between research, architecture and product, and development. You will develop formal artifacts as early as possible in the development process that grow with the project and continue to provide impact throughout into the late stages. You will develop and iteratively refine specifications, working towards high quality designs, prototypes and practical implementations. Your work will form part of the day-to-day quality assurance of production system development. In some projects, critical steps will be tested, or proven using appropriate formal frameworks and tools. In other projects, the expected performance of the resulting system will be modeled, so that the impact of design decisions on performance and stability can be assessed early on. Based on this process, you will provide feedback to the researchers. Finally, based on their specifications, designs, simulations and/or prototypes, you will advise and assist other development teams to implement and integrate their work into production systems.

In particular, by working as part of the Marlowe team, you will help integrate the specification of Marlowe with those of other parts of the Cardano ecosystem that Marlowe relies on. You will investigate the properties of the language and its implementation, and you will use that knowledge to produce automatically verifiable proofs about those properties, to inform the evolution of the design of Marlowe, and to participate in the development of static analysis tools to support the users of Marlowe.

As a member of the Formal Methods Chapter you will participate in knowledge sharing and continuous learning through interactions with Formal Methods Engineers across the company and more broadly with researchers and engineers as well.

Duties

• Build formal artifacts from research and architectural guidance, and business and engineering requirements.
• Model the performance of formally specified systems
• Produce prototypes and simulations
• Refine specifications, using the performance models and simulations to gauge the impact of design decisions during refinements
• Discover new properties about the specifications and their implications
• Prove properties of the specifications and of the correctness of refinement steps
• Communicate with both researchers and developers, and act as a bridge between the two: you will provide feedback to researchers about issues that come up when their work is incorporated into real world systems. You will assist developers in understanding your specifications and in turning them into production code
• Report on your work, in the form of blog posts, technical report documents, presentations at internal seminars, as well as at workshops and conferences, and/or by contributing to academic papers
• Participate in code reviews
• Contribute property-based tests, both for testing properties of the executable specifications/prototypes, and for verifying production code against the executable specifications
• Contribute to the implementation, extension, and maintenance of custom static analysis tooling
• Work in an international team across multiple time zones
• Break down large and complex tasks assigned to you into workable items, and work on them independently
• Share specialized knowledge with other team members

Key Competencies

• Deep thinking, problem solving
• Ability to understand and translate overview of complex ideas and break it down simply for yourself and others
• Bridge between research and engineers
• Translate and reshape information for the coders to understand properly
• Telling researchers when there is a discrepancy - feedback to research
• To be able to receive input from researchers thoroughly understand and translate information into final code
• Continuously brings fresh ideas to the mix
• Ability to function well in a team
• Be versatile and enjoy a fast-paced, ever-changing environment
• Be a savvy problem solver

• Ability to explain complex concepts in documents and presentations

Education / Experience

• A higher degree in Computer Science or a related field
• A minimum of 2-3 years of experience in a functional language, preferably Haskell
• Experience working and collaborating with Git
• Prior experience with theorem provers, solvers, or model checkers is essential
• Experience with static analysis is essential
• Experience in one or more of the domains we are working in (networking, distributed systems, programming language design, blockchain applications) would be a bonus.
• Demonstrated ability to work on difficult problems in a self-driven way

Location

IOG is a distributed organization and therefore this is a remote position. Due to team distribution, we are ideally searching for someone in the United States OR Ireland/UK.

The base salary for this position has a range of $125k up to $175k per year at the commencement of employment. Any offer is determined by overall experience and performance during the interview process. This is only part of the total compensation package.

All Colleagues

• Flexible schedule
• Laptop reimbursement
• New starter package to buy hardware essentials (headphones, monitor, etc)
• Learning & Development Opportunities
• Competitive PTO and Sick Leave plan

US Employees

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits coverage through Anthem for the employee and dependents
• 401k
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance

UK & Ireland Employees

• Monthly Health Stipend to use towards any wellness or medical coverage/service
• Pension

At IOG, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.