About the Company:

World is building a real human network designed to accelerate people in the age of AI. As bots and autonomous agents reshape the internet, people, institutions, and applications need a trusted way to confirm who is a real human while preserving privacy. Our products make this possible: the Orb verifies real people, World ID proves it privately, and World App enables and distributes the new applications made possible by this technology. Together, they form a new layer for AI internet.

We’re one of the fastest-growing networks in tech. More than 17 million people across 160 countries have verified with World ID, and we complete over 350,000 verifications each week. World App is already among the most used wallets globally. Developers are integrating World ID to build safer online experiences and create spaces where real people can participate, earn, and be recognized in ways AI simply can’t replicate.

World was founded in 2019 and launched globally in 2023. We are more than 400 people across hardware, software, AI, cryptography, mobile engineering, and global operations. Our teams come from OpenAI, Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Google, Stripe, Meta, Coinbase, Palantir and MIT Media Lab. We’re backed by leading investors, including a16z, Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital, Variant, Tiger Global, and Coinbase Ventures, as well as prominent operators and founders across fintech and AI.

World has been featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, highlighted in Fast Company’s Next 5 in Fintech, and explored in a Bloomberg deep dive. The New York Times, Bankless and TechCrunch have all recognized our progress in identity, cryptography, AI, and global-scale hardware deployment. Our leadership is also named to the Time AI 100. Learn more about the newest product launches from our Unwrapped event.

About the Team:

Our multidisciplinary team’s mission is to detect & respond to attacks against the global-scale identity World ID service, which leverages mobile apps (Android and iOS), a unique hardware device (the Orb), cloud-hosted APIs, and operations on the (Ethereum-based) Worldchain blockchain to provide privacy-preserving “proof of human”. Together, we apply expertise in mobile devices, hardware, cloud infrastructure, application security, intrusion detection, machine learning/AI, blockchain, incident response, and more to solve these novel challenges.

This team works closely with the teams building the core technologies, because D&R and Privacy are foundational elements of the World Network.

About the Role:

Internship in our Detection & Response team to work on a distributed analytics system. We want to execute a smart contract that incentivizes any third party to run a specific set of code, against a specific set of data, publish the output, and prove that the calculation was done correctly. This is blockchain-based verifiable compute for Detection Engineering.

This project is in early stages, and we are only expecting what can be accomplished within an internship. But you’re helping to get a challenging and interesting project off the ground.

We are building an entirely new automated detection and response system. Right now it needs to protect the 17 million+ verified World ID users processing millions of identity and financial transactions a day, and it will need to rapidly scale to protect billions of users using trusted and untrusted hardware, much of which we will not own. We will publish audit events to the public blockchain for the highest possible transparency and trust of the World ID system, and build decentralized detection & response using those logs. We need to do all this while maintaining the strongest possible privacy protections.

About You

• Studying / researching / working with verifiable compute (e.g. zero knowledge ML or zero knowledge virtual machines)

• Some exposure to Rust programming.

• Strong critical thinking and communication skills

• Comfort working cross-functionally with different teams.

• Energized by working in a fast-paced, collaborative environment

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Prior hands-on use of RiscZero, Succinct, Boundless, or other zkVM frameworks.

By submitting your application, you consent to the processing and internal sharing of your CV within the company, in compliance with the GDPR.