DoraHacks

About Dora Factory

Dora Factory is building the next generation of governance infrastructure for decentralized and real-world communities. With the most advanced MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) and anonymous MACI (aMACI) stacks deployed to date, Dora Factory is a leader in privacy-preserving, tamper-resistant voting mechanisms.Our technologies have powered high-impact governance rounds, including the AEZ MACI round, and are actively shaping the future of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), public goods funding, and large-scale civic participation. We are pushing the boundaries of what trustless, anonymous, and autonomous governance can be.

About the Role

A Cryptographic Research Engineer to join our research engineer team focused on advancing the MACI, anonymous MACI, and other advanced governance protocols. You will be designing and engineering novel cryptographic mechanisms that are core to collusion resistance, anonymity, and censorship-resistance in decentralized governance systems and autonomous organizations.Your work will directly contribute to the evolution of autonomous, privacy-preserving organizations.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and develop enhancements to the MACI and aMACI protocols, with a focus on scalability, anonymity, and verifiability.
• Implement and test advanced cryptographic primitives (e.g., ZK-SNARKs, FHE, threshold cryptography) in autonomous systems.
• Collaborate with protocol engineers and product teams to integrate cryptographic innovations into real-world deployments.
• Conduct threat modeling and security analysis to ensure robustness against collusion, bribery, and deanonymization.
• Optimize cryptographic circuits and improve gas efficiency for on-chain operations.
• Publish findings, write documentation, and contribute to open-source codebases supporting MACI/aMACI.
• Stay up to date on cutting-edge cryptographic research and bring best practices to the team.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Cryptography, Foundation Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or related fields.
• Experience working with libraries like Circom, Halo2, Arkworks, or gnark.
• Solid understanding of cryptographic protocols such as zero-knowledge proofs (e.g., SNARKs, STARKs), secure multi-party computation, and anonymous credentials.
• Experience implementing cryptographic systems in Rust, TypeScript, or Solidity.
• A strong understanding of privacy, identity, and governance challenges in decentralized systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Contributions to open-source cryptography repos or zero-knowledge proof systems.
• Prior experience with MACI or anonymous voting systems.
• Familiarity with Ethereum and layer-2 ecosystems, especially ZK-rollups.
• Familiarity with CosmosSDK and CosmosWasm.
• Publications or active participation in cryptography or blockchain research communities (e.g., IACR, ZK Summit, EthResearch).
• Familiarity with governance design, decentralized voting mechanisms, and DAOs.