The ideal candidate has a master/phd in systems, compilers, programming languages, or distributed systems; but never gets to use it in their day job. Synthetic Minds will allow you to leverage your technical chops.
Synthetic Minds is building program synthesizers, i.e., automation that can write code. We have a system in production that reads/writes smart contracts in Ethereum's Solidity language, and we use it to ensure our customer's code is secure and correct. Eventually, we plan on going far beyond smart contracts. Think of what we are building as a compiler that takes code and translates it to theorem proving, so that we can build automation that can understand code almost as close to a human. If it can understand code, with sufficient compute it can even “synthesize” it.
In Oct 2018, we raised a $5.6M seed round from Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures and Pantera Capital [6]. We have paying customers and a backlog waiting to be on-boarded. The team is heavily experienced. This is the founder’s second startup and they have a PhD in the area. The 1st employee was the first hire at Parse (YC S11) and has 10 yrs at Google. We aim to be a 10-15 person all-engineering team in 2019.
Roles/Openings (see [1]): # Software engineer: Systems/infrastructure — You’ll be working on distributing heavy CPU processes on AWS. Making sure processes run reliably over many days. Ensure robustness of the infrastructure across node/process/memory/algorithm failures.
# Software engineer: Compilers/verification/synthesis — You’ll be working on developing new algorithms that analyze and generate code [2]. You’ll identify when an engineering solution is needed (i.e., throw across a cluster of machines), or when an algorithmic improvement is required. You might even play with the Z3 theorem prover [3]. And if you’re really into it, you can improve Z3.
# Software engineer: Smart contracts — You’ll be working on the “front-end of the compiler”, which reads in smart contracts languages (e.g., Solidity) and makes it accessible to the backend (the part that does semantic analysis). Desire to work at the compiler level of smart contracts is required, e.g., see [4] — experience in writing smart contracts is easily acquired as a side effect.
Contact: saurabhs@synthetic-minds.com - Saurabh, Founder
[1] Synthetic Minds Jobs: https://synthetic-minds.com/pages/jobs.html
[2] Program synthesis: https://medium.com/@vidiborskiy/software-writes-software-pro...
[3] Z3 Theorem Prover: https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3
[4] Solidity AST: https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/blob/develop/libsolidit...
[5] Solidity smart contracts: https://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/v0.4.21/solidity-by-examp...
[6] Forbes funding article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrynpollock/2018/10/22/invest...