Hardware Internship Program

About the Hardware Team

The Hardware Team at Nethermind is pioneering biometric security solutions. We apply advanced cryptography and blockchain to create secure, privacy-preserving hardware systems for identity verification and tamper-proof authentication.

Areas of Internship Focus:

• 3D Biometric Imaging & Reconstruction: Research and develop computer vision techniques for low cost 3D biometric reconstruction to improve matching accuracy and spoof detection.

• Privacy-Preserving CNN Improvement: Develop continual learning methods to adapt CNNs for biometric verification without storing raw data. Use flow or score-matching models to generate privacy-safe synthetic data, enabling on-device or TEE-contained updates without degrading accuracy.

• TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) Integration: Implement secure pipelines where camera capture, CNN inference, encryption, and attestation all occur inside a TEE for maximum security.

• Presentation Attack Defence: Designing and testing methods to identify attempts to fool our biometric system.

• Next-Generation Imaging Methods: Explore alternative imaging approaches to reduce power consumption, enable device miniaturisation, and enhance image quality.

• Tamper Prevention: Designing hardware and manufacturing methods to ensure robustness against physical tampering or counterfeiting.

• Manufacturing Optimisation: Reviewing form factor, component selection, assembly, and test fixture processes to reduce overall cost and improve user experience.

• Applied Cryptography: Working with the research team to incorporate MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and ZKP (Zero-Knowledge Proof) protocols to enhance biometric data security.

Diverse Skills You Can Learn and Use

• Biometric Image Processing & ML: Build and train models for biometric feature extraction, matching, 3D reconstruction, and anti-spoofing.

• Machine Learning Pipeline Research: Explore privacy-preserving ML flows for improving CNNs in production without storing training data.

• Electronics & Sensor Engineering: Work on tamper prevention, modular component design, power optimisation, and miniaturisation for biometric devices.

• Tamper Prevention Hardware Design: Apply secure manufacturing techniques and security engineering to prevent and detect physical intrusion.

• Secure Cryptographic Protocols: Implement MPC, ZKP, and TEE-based processing to ensure biometric data never leaves the secure environment in raw form.

• Embedded Systems & Firmware: Develop firmware to integrate sensors, cryptographic modules, embedded deployment (Yokto) and secure data pipelines.

• Imaging System Innovation: Research and test imaging methods that reduce power draw while enhancing accuracy and reliability.

• Product Prototyping & Testing: Design, build, and evaluate hardware prototypes for accuracy, reliability, and security.

We Are Looking For

• Machine Learning Engineers with expertise in computer vision, biometric recognition, 3D reconstruction, or anti-spoofing techniques.

• Embedded developers experienced with Yocto, deploying on embedded systems, or working with Trusted Execution Environments

• Electronics Engineers experienced with either sensor systems, power optimisation, PCB design, tamper prevention, penetration testing.

• Manufacturing Engineers with knowledge of secure manufacturing processes, or experience in component sourcing.

• MPC & ZKP Engineers skilled in designing privacy-preserving protocols for biometric verification or secure enclave integration.

• Optical Engineers with experience in advanced imaging methods, preferably with biometric experience.

Helpful Experience Includes:

• Biometric data acquisition and processing

• Applied cryptography for secure hardware

• Industrial design with a security focus

• Hardware security evaluation and testing

If you’re passionate about biometric hardware, cryptography, and building secure systems that work in the real world, we’d love to hear from you.