Cryptography Architect
Full Time
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Remote-first
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Visa Sponsorship Available
About the Role
Silence Laboratories is hiring a Cryptography Architect to own the design, review, implementation guidance, and evolution of our core cryptographic protocols, including MPC/TSS infrastructure, Silent Shard, Silent Compute, and post-quantum key-management work.
This role is for someone who can move between research-level cryptography and production engineering. You should be able to read and critique papers, write implementation-ready protocol specifications, reason about adversarial models, partner with engineers, and engage credibly with external auditors and academic collaborators. The goal is not to produce elegant theory in isolation. The goal is to make institutional-grade cryptographic infrastructure correct, secure, deployable, and reviewable.
What You Will Own
Lead protocol design and evolution for core MPC/TSS, signing, key-management, and post-quantum migration work.
Translate cryptographic papers and mathematical specifications into implementation-ready designs.
Review existing protocol implementations, threat models, and security assumptions before they reach production.
Establish a repeatable threat-modeling process for protocol work across the company.
Partner with Rust/backend engineers to ensure implementations preserve protocol intent and security properties.
Work with external cryptographic audit firms, researchers, and security reviewers.
Produce clear protocol specs, design notes, threat models, and audit-facing documentation.
What Success Looks Like
A major protocol path moves from design or review into a production-ready implementation with clear specifications and security assumptions.
Existing protocol implementations have stronger written threat models, review notes, and remediation plans.
Engineering teams can use your protocol specs without losing the mathematical or security intent.
External audit preparation and response are faster because protocol decisions, assumptions, and known risks are documented clearly.
The post-quantum migration path is concrete enough for product, engineering, and customer-facing teams to reason about tradeoffs.
Researchers and production engineers trust you to challenge designs directly while keeping collaboration healthy and useful.
What You Bring
Deep applied cryptography experience, ideally across MPC, threshold signatures, distributed key generation, secret sharing, ZK proofs, or related protocol areas.
Ability to read, critique, and implement from cryptographic papers, formal specs, and IACR-style research.
Experience translating research into engineering specifications that production teams can implement.
Strong threat-modeling instincts and a habit of identifying weak assumptions before adversaries do.
Familiarity with production cryptographic engineering in Rust, Go, C, C++, or similarly relevant systems languages.
Clear written communication across audiences: researchers, engineers, auditors, and technical leadership.
Low-ego collaboration style: able to challenge protocol designs directly while preserving trust with researchers and engineers.
Nice to Have
Direct experience with DKLs23, FROST, CGGMP21, Schnorr, EdDSA, ECDSA, BIP-340, or related threshold-signature protocols.
Familiarity with NIST post-quantum standards and migration constraints for regulated financial infrastructure.
Experience with HSMs, TEEs, confidential compute, key ceremonies, or regulated cryptographic operations.
Prior external audit collaboration with firms such as Trail of Bits, NCC Group, Kudelski, or similar.
Academic publications, open-source cryptographic implementations, or significant protocol-review artifacts.
Why Silence Laboratories
Silence Laboratories operates at the intersection of deep cryptographic research and high-stakes production deployment. Our team brings together PhD researchers with affiliations at MIT CSAIL, UIUC, NUS, and SUTD, engineers from globally top-ranked security teams, and industry veterans with leadership experience at Oracle, VMware, Snapchat, and other leading technology companies. The distance between a new cryptographic result and production code is intentionally short here.
For this role, that means helping financial institutions adopt modern cryptographic infrastructure without weakening control, auditability, or operational resilience. The work has to satisfy cryptographers, engineers, customers, security teams, and regulators.
Compensation
Competitive base, equity participation, and visa or EOR support where applicable. Final compensation depends on location, seniority, and depth of experience in regulated financial infrastructure, HSM-backed systems, compliance architecture, and key-management work. We discuss compensation expectations early so both sides can confirm alignment before deeper technical interviews.
Our Hiring Process
Application & written screen: CV plus four short-answer questions. We read every one.
Intro call with hiring manager (45 min): Mutual qualification, role context, comp expectations, candidate questions.
Architecture deep-dive (90 min): Walk through a real deployment you owned, then a working session on a regulated-deployment scenario we provide.
Cross-functional panel (2 to 3 conversations): Cryptography, engineering, and customer-facing stakeholders.
References & offer: Two backchannel references. Offer typically follows within a week.