Spotlight: Sara Drakeley, MobileCoin CTO
Meet Sara, MobileCoin’s CTO and Maker of Magic.
Q: Tell us about yourself.
A: I’m Sara Drakeley, CTO of MobileCoin. My origins root from a non-linear path through animation, finance, and aerospace, before ultimately arriving at cryptocurrency.
Q: What drove you to join the world of cryptocurrency?
A: In 2017, there was a huge boom in crypto. I was working at a hedge fund in traditional finance. Crypto was the talk of the town. One of the things I missed about working in animation was feeling like I had a purpose that was affecting people’s lives. Seeing what MobileCoin was building with their privacy element and the potential for helping so many types of people drew me in.
Q: When you talk about being able to use animation to reach out and impact many people, are you referring to when you made the water in Disney’s Moana?
A: That’s right! My specialty was procedural geometry, or anything that a computer could do faster and more precisely than a human. What was fun about technology at Disney was that we weren’t building standard physics engines, we were building physics with an element of magic.
Q: Fantastic. We’d love to hear about your MobileCoin journey.
A: I was the third engineering hire back in August 2018, which provided me the opportunity to work on nearly every aspect of the MobileCoin technology ecosystem. I implemented some of the early SGX attestation procedures, contributed to the development of our consensus protocol, and built out much of our initial infrastructure.
One of the major problems we wanted to solve at MobileCoin was the ability to send and receive transactions from your mobile device, without your private keys ever leaving the device. To that end, we developed MobileCoin Fog, which I see as one of MobileCoin’s major contributions to the blockchain industry, and I became the manager of the Fog team.
Now as the CTO, I’m currently building out the Research branch at MobileCoin. We’re researching smart contracts, zero knowledge proofs, and various ways to improve our protocol at both the transaction level and the consensus mechanism.
Q: Sounds like you’ve got a very diverse background and an equally diverse helping hand within MobileCoin! What’s your favorite part about working at MobileCoin?
A: The team we’ve built comprises some of the smartest, kindest, and hardest working people I’ve met. It feels like being part of a big rock orchestra where everyone is the virtuoso of their own instruments, and together we’re making a beautiful symphony.
Q: What excites you most about the future of MobileCoin?
A: What I’m most excited about takes acknowledging what we’ve built already: MobileCoin is at the bleeding edge of technology, addressing how we get people to actually use crypto in a way that they want to use. In the future, we’re going to continue to answer that question in terms of serving people in their financial lives in their needs around privacy and convenience in the payments space.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: We’re currently hiring at MobileCoin for almost every type of technical position you can imagine. If you’re interested in working with the MobileCoin team in a variety of engineering roles, please reach out to hiring@mobilecoin.com.
