Remote Founding Engineer – Backend

Summary

The job is for a founding backend engineer to join a small team at Shadow, a crypto data platform startup based in NYC. The role involves designing and building the backend infrastructure, handling large amounts of onchain data, and driving business outcomes. The tech stack includes Rust, Kubernetes, GCP, Kafka, BigTable, Postgres, Snowflake/BigQuery, Typescript, Next.js, Solidity, and Vyper.

Requirements

• You're an ambitious senior or staff-level IC with experience building performant and scalable backend infrastructure and distributed systems
• Excited about designing and building robust infrastructure from the ground up.. You think about all the different ways your code could be used, extended, and scaled in the future, not just today. Owning several services and jumping into all of them doesn't scare you
• Interest in onchain data and data infrastructure.. You’ve built distributed systems that handle terabytes of data, and are deeply familiar with event-driven architectures
• Curious and quick learning.. We don't expect you to have experience in every technology we use, but to learn and be productive quickly. We value people who can quickly obtain a deep technical understanding of new domains
• Pragmatic attention to detail.. You hold your work to a high standard. You strive for few slips in code, clean Git hygiene, and clear written communication — all while remaining low-ego and solution oriented
• Good heart.. We are a group of friendly ambitious nerds who are effortlessly kind to one another, and we don't tolerate jerks

Responsibilities

• Design and build the new standard for blockchain data infrastructure
• Own the end-to-end backend implementation for new products
• Crush every other benchmark.. We plan to publicly release benchmarks vs other onchain data systems, and your name will be listed prominently for everyone to see
• Drive business outcomes.. Performance is a major differentiator in this space. Every optimization you make will lead directly to winning customers and market share

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary and equity
• Great healthcare.. Gold-tier company healthcare plans. We cover 99% of medical, dental, vision premiums for employees, and 50% for dependents
• 401k.. Flexible 401k retirement plan with contribution matching
• In-person culture.. We work out of a beautiful office in Soho New York with other early-stage crypto teams, and have a culture of coming in 5 days a week as a default
• Hardware setup.. We’ll buy whatever you need to be productive