Shadow Logo Shadow
Shadow Logo

Founding Engineer at Tech Entertainment Startup

💰 $50,000 - $100,000 📅 09/26/2023

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Founding Engineer – Production Infrastructure

💰 $220,000 - $300,000 📅 05/02/2024

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Job Description

At Shadow, we’re building the end-to-end data platform for crypto.

Blockchain networks are the next evolution of the Internet, yet it’s much too
difficult to work with onchain data today. We’re taking a crypto-native
approach to reimagine blockchain data infrastructure from the ground up,
starting with a product that allows anyone to extract custom data from any
smart contract.

We've raised $9M in seed funding led by Paradigm, with additional angels from
Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, and
Flashbots.

We're a small team who primarily works out of a beautiful office space in NYC.

**We’re hiring a founding production infrastructure engineer to join our
world-class team.**

### About the role

In this role you’ll be working closely with the CTO to architect, maintain,
and scale the infrastructure and services that power Shadow. You should get
excited about building fast and flexible infrastructure that can handle large
volumes of realtime and historical data.

### What you'll do (responsibilities)

We're looking for an experienced IC who wants to:

* **Build the new standard for onchain data.** You will own large parts of the infrastructure that become the new standard for storing, processing, and indexing onchain data.

* **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.

### Our tech stack

* Kubernetes on GCP, ArgoCD, Pulumi

* Backend infrastructure built in Rust

* Kafka, BigTable, Postgres, Snowflake/BigQuery

* Typescript and Next.js

* Solidity and Vyper

### What we're looking for (qualifications)

You're an ambitious staff-level IC with 0-1 experience building performant and
scalable backend infrastructure and distributed systems.

* **Confident with managing large-scale cloud infrastructure deployments**. You have extensive experience with container orchestration tools like Kubernetes.

* **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.

### **Why join**

**Team** — we have a high bar; you'll be on a small team of extremely talented
individuals.

**Impact** — work on stuff that actually matters and will grow crypto as a
whole.

**Ownership** — you will have an extreme level of autonomy over your work.

### **Who you 'll be working with**

[Emily](https://linkedin.com/in/hsiaemily) (Co-Founder and CTO) — Previously
Paradigm EIR, and Staff Engineer → Engineering Manager at Airbnb, where she
built the realtime indexer for user profiling used sitewide and managed a team
of 15 engineers. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi summer 2020.

[Alvin](https://linkedin.com/in/alvinhsia) (Co-Founder and CEO) — Previously
Paradigm EIR, and Designer → Staff Product Manager at Airbnb, where he was the
first PM on Airbnb Plus and helped take it from a whiteboard idea to a
$100M/yr business in 2.5 years. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi
Summer 2020.

Emily and Alvin are siblings and have worked together for the past 8 years!

### **What we offer (compensation & benefits)**

**Highly competitive salary and equity** — we target 90th percentile
compensation for both salary and equity. You’ll be expected to act like an
owner, because you are one.

**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.

### **Work trials**

We’re a fan of paid work trials. We believe they’re the best way to learn
whether there’s a mutual fit, and equally beneficial for the candidate as the
company.

_This is not a requirement_ , as we understand that every individual’s
situation is different. We'll discuss details during the process, but work
trials are fully paid, and usually last 3-5 days where we have your full time
and focus during the period – e.g. you’ve taken PTO at your full-time job,
have no other contract work obligations, etc.

Shadow focuses on Blockchains. Their company has offices in New York City.
They have a small team that's between 1-10 employees.

You can view their website at <https://tryshadow.xyz> or find them on
[Twitter](https://twitter.com/_shadowxyz).