About Tonk

Tonk is an in-person, London-based startup.

Right now, we’re building tools so that creative people can have their own little internet. From a technical perspective this means bringing down the cost of interoperability between applications by building a maximally interoperable data network between small-scale AI-built apps. The vision is to build a new kind of internet.

This network is necessary to service the incoming explosion of “personal software” - where AI brings development costs to 0 and so creates a huge market for regular people to create billions of highly bespoke apps to share with their friends, family, coworkers & communities. For these local apps to be useful they need to be able to read any kind of data from anywhere else. Ideally it should be as simple as calling user.isParent? , conference.address() or similar, from any application, and users sharing any information they permit. This dream presents a huge interoperability challenge but one that is fundamentally tractable for a team like Tonk thanks to recent progress in ZK, sync engines, and other programmable cryptography.

Our mission is to tear down the internet and build a better one. We weren't content with the growing cost and inconvenience of a web centred around platforms, so in 2022 we decided to do something about it. Since then we have drawn on progress in advanced peer-to-peer systems, including zero-knowledge proofs, digital signatures, blockchain, local-first software & programmable cryptography. Tonk is supported by Electric Capital, Bankless Ventures, Entrepreneur First and a community of angels leading many of the most exciting P2P innovations today.

The role you’ll play

Organisationally, Tonk Labs is modelled on the principle that has underpinned most breakthrough innovation in history: gather a small group of exceptional people and give them the permission and resources to dream big and experiment fast. It’s also 2025 and the first one-person unicorn may have already incorporated. Tonk may never grow to be larger than 10 employees.

In this team, your role will be to ship code, iterate with customers, and join us in prototyping next-gen products and protocols.

This role could grow into an leading research role, senior architect role or engineering executive role as Tonk grows.

Core responsibilities include:

• Implementing cutting-edge cryptographic systems across diverse tech environments.

• Designing and architecting protocols.

• Secure and efficient smart contract development.

• Frontend development.

Candidates should expect some travel to keep up with the travelling fair of conferences.

What we’re looking for

Traits

We only have two prerequisites:

• You’re incredibly driven;

• You’re unbelievably fast at learning.

Most people we make offers to have shown these traits outside of their professional path. For example, if you were starting out as a software engineer, but reached the top of your field in karate (for example), that’s a massive green flag for us.

Technical skills

From then on, the “ideal candidate” would demonstrate the following hard skills:

• Agility to touch any part of the stack, from frontend to database and distributed systems;

• Familiarity with applied cryptography, including hash functions, encryption schemes, proof schemes, etcetera - and the mathematical training to back it up;

• Expertise in designing and deploying distributed systems;

• Deep understanding of relevant protocols and the general landscape of blockchain infrastructure;

• Expertise deploying smart contracts to mainnet;

• Prior work on software dev infra and tooling;

• It’s not a requirement but the candidate can expect to be working with Rust, Solidity, Go and Javascript.