yak.ad/consulting

Consulting

Architecture, protocols and systems that are meant to keep working — built or fixed with extreme rigour, so that they run nearly all the time with minimal maintenance.

Available in limited capacity. Most of Yak's time over the coming months is already committed to existing projects and engagements, so it takes on very little new work. A genuinely hard or unusual system is still always worth a message, and the answer comes quickly either way.

What

Software architecture and reliable systems. Networking and consensus protocols, and protocols in general. Fail-safe systems and the algorithms beneath them. Blockchain systems, from consensus and ledger design to the client. Applied cryptography, including zero-knowledge proofs. The common thread: designs where correctness is argued, not hoped for, and where the failure modes are enumerated before the code is written.

How

Managing an existing projectTechnical leadership of a team already in flight — plans, schedules, architecture decisions, the customer relationship.technical lead

Review and re-architectureReading a system as it is, saying plainly what will break and why, and restructuring it so it stops breaking.review

Novel product creationFrom an idea to a running, maintainable system: exploration, prototypes, the first production release.product

Product explorationStarting from a vague idea and finding, together, what the thing actually is — and whether it should be built at all.exploration

Long-term engagements

Both multi-year, both as external partners embedded with the client's engineering team.

o1Labs2021 – present

Technical leadership and architecture for the Mina protocol and the products around it — today, overseeing execution across the whole engineering team. Earlier: re-architecting the protocol's networking layer, and introducing a data-driven, fully automated experimental approach to the core blockchain implementation, so that every new release is stress-tested before it ships.

Serokell2016 – 2021

Software development leadership for Serokell's blockchain clients: the core team behind Cardano SL — ledger, consensus, networking — through to mainnet; technical lead and chief architect for StakerDAO's products, including a trustless, DoS-resilient token bridge across Algorand, Ethereum and Tezos.

Describe the system and what it must not do.george@yak.ad