We’re hiring!

Are you a talented developer? … who has experience of banking technology and a passion for blockchain technology?

Can you tell your nostro from your vostro? … and do you have an intuitive understanding of why it’s quite so hard to change anything in a bank?!

Do you understand why Bitcoin works the way it does? … and can you explain the block size debate in a way that all sides would agree was fair?

Can you explain why $100 at Chase is different to $100 at Wells Fargo? … and can you design a data model that reflects this reality?

Do you have a passion to transform the world of finance by applying insights from the worlds of cryptography, blockchain technology and distributed systems?

If so, we should speak.

At R3, we’re working on what I think is the most interesting and exciting technology project in finance for years and we’re hiring talented, motivated professionals to turn our vision into a reality.

If you think “a blockchain” is the answer to every question then you probably shouldn’t apply. But if you think the application of modern cryptography, consensus techniques and modern internet-scale technologies to some of the thorniest problems in financial technology sounds exciting, please email me.

Before you do, however, some background. Because I’m convinced many people are thinking about the problems and opportunities completely back to front…

The reality is that banks were amongst the earliest adopters of information technology and, contrary to popular belief, they have done a good job in automating previously manual processes and in digitising previously physical processes.

But there are, of course, significant opportunities to improve the cost and efficiency of the architectures that have emerged – and today’s developments in blockchain technology and distributed ledgers are showing us how.

At core, this is all about moving from firm-level systems to industry-level systems.

Today, each bank has its own ledgers, which record that firm’s view of its agreements and positions with respect to its customer set and its counterparts – and its counterparts, in turn, maintain their views. This duplication, whilst robust, is expensive and can lead to inconsistencies, and it drives a need for costly matching, reconciliation and fixing of errors by and among the various parties to a transaction. To the extent that differences remain between two firms’ views of the same transaction, this is also a source of risk, some of it potentially systemic.

The maturation of cryptographic techniques, exemplified in part by “blockchain technology”, provides a new opportunity: the possibility of authoritative systems of record that are securely shared between firms. This provides the opportunity to implement new shared platforms for the recording of financial events and processing of business logic: one where a single global logical ledger is authoritative for agreements between firms recorded on it, even though the relationships and obligations recorded remain between those firms.

I believe successful, transformational, large-scale deployments of shared ledger technologies in finance depend on the adoption of an architecture that is designed from the ground up to address the functional and non-functional requirements of banks. And the non-functional requirements are really, really, exacting.

It’s why I hired James Carlyle, Mike Hearn and Ian Grigg to start building out our technical leadership team: I might be CTO but I’m not remotely clever or experienced enough even to begin to figure out the answers to these questions.

And it’s also why we’re hiring talented developers, designers and architects to join our team.

So, if you’re experienced, intelligent, curious and motivated by solving difficult problems in distributed systems in finance, I can think of no better places to be working right now.

email me at richard@r3cev.com if you want to talk.