Description review

Distributed Systems Engineer

Axiom · USA · back to the listing

HR standards

48/100

poor

Title ↔ description

79/100

solid

Reads as

Backend Engineer

99% confident

What this role officially is

software developer — ESCO, the EU occupation classification

Software developers implement or program all kinds of software systems based on specifications and designs by using programming languages, tools, and platforms.

Also known as: application developer, application programmer, solutions developer, programmer, software specialist, application software developer

How others title the same work

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Startups

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What the listing never says

  • No section describes what the person would actually do. Scope clarity
  • No pay range published. Candidates cannot tell whether applying is worth their time. Pay transparency

The listing, marked up

Nothing in the wording of this listing tripped a check. The scores above still judge how complete and coherent it is.

About Us

Axiom is using zero-knowledge proofs to enable new types of verifiable and private software applications, starting with crypto and fintech. We are a small but incredibly strong team backed by the best investors in crypto. We’re looking for exceptional people who are excited to work on challenging and impactful problems in a fast-paced environment. Our office is in NYC and working in person in NY is our strong preference, but we're open to remote candidates as well.

We recently released OpenVM, a performant and modular zkVM framework built for customization and extensibility. OpenVM allows developers to verify the correct execution of arbitrary computer programs in a flexible and performant way. We are building ZK-enabled products using OpenVM and supporting teams building on OpenVM.

The Role

We are looking for a distributed systems engineer to join a startup using zero-knowledge proofs to scale smart contract applications. You will be responsible for building Rust-based rollup nodes and sequencers to deliver zero-knowledge proof based products on-chain. Your work will require designing secure and efficient systems and making design choices to enable rapid development without sacrificing security.

We are looking for someone with strong engineering design skills, a security mindset, and the ability to design and implement blockchain protocols. We also value the ability to make pragmatic technology choices which empower our small team.

Who you are

•
You are fluent in Rust, C++, or a similarly performant backend language. We work primarily in Rust.

•
You have experience deploying and monitoring high uptime applications to production in the cloud using orchestration and containerization (Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes).

•
You have experience working within a large production codebase.

•
You are extremely detail oriented and have a security mindset.

•
You’re a clear communicator and value collaboration.

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You have a bias towards action and extremely strong work ethic.

Bonuses

•
You have experience working with blockchain nodes like Geth, Reth, or similar.

•
You have experience with low-level details of Ethereum.

•
You have experience working in an adversarial or security critical environment.

Why work with us

•
You’ll be working on groundbreaking tech that has the potential to be a key piece of infrastructure for the crypto industry

•
You’ll receive a competitive salary with equity

•
You will work with and receive mentorship from an exceptional team

Our Team

Our founders Yi Sun and Jonathan Wang met while studying math at Harvard and have been working on ZK since 2021. Together, they wrote some of the most performant ZK circuits for elliptic curve cryptography and Ethereum data reads before starting Axiom.

Before Axiom, Yi was a professor at UChicago Statistics and did a math PhD at MIT. He was previously an advisor for Gauntlet and worked at an HFT startup from inception to profitable trading. Jonathan published number theory research in top math journals and did a math PhD at UChicago.

The rest of our small but incredibly strong team includes alums of Applied Intuition, Coinbase, Color, Neon, Google, and Perplexity as well as math / CS PhDs and IMO / IPhO / Codeforces winners. We look forward to working with you!

How this was produced

Highlights are found by rule, not by a model: each one is a phrase matched at a known position, and every note is a template we wrote. The two scores come from a typed-decision model (Jev) that reads the listing against the official role definition and real listings for the same role, and returns probabilities rather than prose — it never writes any of the words on this page, and never chooses what to highlight.

Deterministic penalty applied to the HR score: 12 points (from 60 before penalties). Reviewed 21 Sep 2026.