Welcome to the IOTA Foundation – April 2022

Marina Schmid

Marina is joining the IOTA Foundation as a Junior People Operations Specialist. In this role, she is responsible for mastering HR-related administrative and operational matters concerning the entire employee lifecycle. Marina lives in Regensburg, Bavaria (Germany) and has recently graduated with a master’s degree in Human Resource Management. During her degree, she worked as an HR assistant in an IT company that focuses on digitalizing business processes. She was also responsible for HR administration, recruiting, and employer branding. She joins the IOTA Foundation because she is convinced of IOTA’s goal of building a new digital economy and is looking forward to growing with IOTA’s global team.

I feel honored to be part of the IOTA Foundation because I find it rewarding to work in such an international and open-minded environment. I’m very excited to support the People Team in delivering excellent HR work!

Yuan YangHao

YangHao joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior Software Engineer (Golang) in the Engineering team. In this role, he will focus on the Wasp project. YangHao lives in Tainan, Taiwan, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. During his degree and afterward, he worked as a Software Engineer in the blockchain and Chatbot industry, helping to develop secure message channels and high-speed calculations. He joins the IOTA Foundation because he is interested in working on a promising project that is highly scalable and flexible and a team with a mission to create big waves in the IoT space.

The IOTA Tangle is designed to operate on low-tech devices with minimal energy consumption. IOTA can also be implemented in isolated locations that have limited connectivity.

Jason Kraft

Jason joins the IOTA Foundation as a Software Engineer in the Firefly team. In this role, he will focus on extending Firefly’s functionality and supporting protocol improvements. Jason lives in Seattle, Washington, and has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Virginia Tech. He joins the IOTA Foundation because he sees IOTA as a disruptor to current alternatives in the cryptocurrency space and is determined to help IOTA bridge the gap between nascent technology and established standards.

I am thrilled to be a part of the IOTA Foundation! Like many, I stumbled upon IOTA in 2017 while exploring alternatives to blockchain solutions. The recent protocol improvements to support native tokens and smart contracts on top of the Tangle make me extremely excited about the future of IOTA. I am grateful for this opportunity to work on a project that I care deeply about, and I am eager to make these changes accessible to the community through my work on the Firefly wallet.

Carola Dierkes

Carola joins the IOTA Foundation as the Head of People and Culture. She will focus on Talent Acquisition, Performance Management, Leadership, and several other people-related organizational topics. After finishing her studies in psychology, sociology, and human resource management, she led different HR teams in several environments from start-up to corporate. With her experience in scaling teams fast and successfully, her mission at IOTA is to support our remote team in growing, learning & developing together.

When I was looking for a fast-moving, international environment with new ways of working, passionate people developing inclusive technologies and where “better society” is not a marketing phrase, but a reality, I discovered IOTA. I am really excited about being a part of this unique journey: shaping web3 with our open-source, sustainable and collaborative approach.

Jyunwei Tseng

Jyunwei joins the IOTA Foundation as a Senior DevOps Engineer on the DevOps team. In this role, he will be responsible for IOTA's infrastructure. Junwei lives in Taipei, Taiwan. He previously worked as a Software Engineer in the blockchain industry building high-performance blockchain services and also has experience in IOTA, EVM, Quorum, ZKP, CBDC research, and development. He will strengthen our ops capabilities. He joins the IOTA Foundation because he loves IOTA and trusts that it will succeed.

Around 2018, the word blockchain began to be seen gradually, but at that time I only thought that the blockchain was a scam and that it was impossible to become the infrastructure of the future. It consumes too much energy, but once IOTA entered my view, I found that IOTA’s goals really impressive - they were not talking about how to get rich or how to issue tokens, but the machine to machine economy, and from that day on I fell in love with IOTA. I am honored to be a part of IOTA’s road to success!

Jean Ribeiro

Jean joins the IOTA Foundation as a Software Engineer in the Engineering department. In this role, he will focus on the Firefly project. Jean lives in Embu-Guaçu, Brazil, and has an associate’s degree in Systems Development and Analysis from FIAP University. Prior to joining the foundation, Jean gained over two years of experience as a software engineer in a Brazilian Etsy company, where he worked on the development of the marketplace’s buying experience as a front-end specialist. He also has experience with back-end and DevOps.

Ever since distributed ledger technologies caught my interest last year, I’ve started studying and investing in them. But I wanted to actively get involved in it by working on a great project, so when I found out about what the IOTA Foundation is doing to revolutionize the industry, it immediately caught my attention – mainly because of the Tangle and its ecosystem's cutting-edge tech. I feel that the greatest goal is to have an eco-friendly blockchain alternative that can be widely adopted and empower people and businesses with a new web3 standard. I'm proud to participate in this mission. I feel happy working on an open-source project with such an awesome community, team, and vision.

We are very happy to officially announce that Marina Schmid, Yuan YangHao, Jason Kraft, Jyunwei Tseng, Jean Ribeiro and Carola Dierkes have joined the IOTA Foundation! Give them all a very warm welcome!

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