Software Engineer Intern

About the role

Ritual is constructing a sovereign execution layer for artificial intelligence where the native chain serves as the foundational substrate for AI-driven operations. The intern will engage directly with the live private testnet, observing how consensus and execution layers behave under realistic AI workloads. You will collaborate closely with cryptographers and machine learning engineers to translate theoretical designs into running code that can be scrutinized by the community. This position sits at the intersection of cryptographic protocol design and open-source AI tooling, requiring comfort with rapidly evolving specifications and experimental features. You will be expected to prototype novel interactions between smart contracts and off-chain AI services using the Infernet abstraction. The role emphasizes rapid experimentation, where ideas move from whiteboard to testnet deployment within short iterative cycles. You will document your findings and contribute back to public repositories, ensuring that every discovery strengthens the shared knowledge of the Ritual community.

Key facts

What you'll do

Investigate edge cases in the current testnet by running targeted experiments that surface latency and failure modes in AI model execution.

Integrate new cryptographic primitives into the execution environment, verifying that they maintain security guarantees under adversarial conditions.

Build reference implementations that demonstrate how on-chain smart contracts can securely request and verify results from off-chain AI models.

Profile resource usage of AI workloads on the Ritual chain, collecting telemetry that informs future protocol improvements.

Collaborate with researchers to formalize informal specifications, turning narrative requirements into testable behavioral documents.

Write robust integration tests that exercise the full stack from transaction submission through AI inference and response validation.

Contribute to open-source tooling around the Ritual ecosystem, improving developer experience and lowering the barrier for new contributors.

Analyze failure traces from the testnet to identify consensus violations or incorrect state transitions triggered by AI workloads.

Design lightweight observability hooks that allow community members to audit the behavior of AI-driven transactions without compromising privacy.

Synthesize findings from testing into clear reports that guide the direction of the next protocol iteration and inspire new research questions.

Challenge assumptions about performance and correctness by proposing alternative cryptographic schemes and evaluating them in a live environment.

Mentor newer community members by reviewing their contributions, suggesting improvements, and maintaining high standards for code quality.

Requirements

You are pursuing or recently completed a degree in computer science, cryptography, mathematics, or a closely related technical field.

You possess strong foundational knowledge in at least one systems programming language such as Rust or Go, with demonstrated ability to write safe and efficient concurrent code.

Experience contributing to open-source projects is expected, and you should be comfortable navigating large, complex repositories with multiple active contributors.

You understand basic cryptographic concepts including digital signatures, hash functions, and public-key infrastructure, and you can reason about their practical implications.

Familiarity with blockchain primitives such as transactions, blocks, consensus mechanisms, and state transitions is necessary for success in this role.

You should be comfortable reading and interpreting academic papers, RFCs, and protocol specifications, even when they are dense or incomplete.

A working knowledge of machine learning concepts, including model architectures, training loops, and inference patterns, is required to evaluate AI integration challenges.

You must be able to communicate technical ideas clearly in writing and code, producing documentation that helps others replicate your work.

Nice to have

Hands-on experience with zero-knowledge proofs, secure multi-party computation, or verifiable execution is a significant advantage.

Prior work on AI alignment, interpretability, or safety tooling that can be integrated into a blockchain context is strongly preferred.

Experience deploying and operating services in cloud environments, managing containerized workloads, and using infrastructure-as-code practices.

Contributions to projects related to decentralized networking, peer-to-peer protocols, or resilient messaging systems.

Practical notes

The internship is fully remote and open to exceptional candidates regardless of their geographic location or institutional affiliation.

There are no specific hours required, but consistent availability during overlapping working hours is necessary for effective collaboration.

Travel is not expected as part of this role, given the entirely remote nature of the engagement.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this position at this time.

Applications will be reviewed continuously until the role is filled, so early submission is encouraged to secure consideration.

Candidates should be prepared to share examples of their work, including source code repositories, write-ups, and public contributions that demonstrate technical depth.