I came to Enigma as a researcher and one of the founding engineers behind the Enigma protocol. My first task was explaining the Ethereum protocol to the rest of the engineering team, to get them fluent enough to build on it. Originally we built the core engine in C/C++, and then decided to rewrite it in Rust, while the language was still unstable enough that shipping with it was itself a bet. I was one of the people who pushed that bet through, understanding it deeply enough to carry the team with it: writing the procedural macros the new secret-contract layer needed myself, and doing the same for WebAssembly, which nobody else at the company understood yet either. A year in, I was presenting that work at a conference in Berlin.

By the time I became team lead — over three sub-teams spanning the computation engine, the peer-to-peer network, and DevOps — Enigma had no shared workflow at all: everyone built whatever they personally judged worth building, with no team goal pulling the pieces together. I brought in Agile methods. For the first time, the team worked toward a single shared goal. The harder part was building a culture where people across three very different disciplines felt safe enough to lead, and to disagree with each other, out loud.