Software Engineer

Software Engineer

About the Role

This is not your run of the mill "build an ETL pipeline to get data from X to Y" engineering role. This is "build an infrastructure framework" where Allium's (potentially less technical) customer can self serve, transform, and receive the data seamlessly, while ensuring data quality is 100% consistent. As such, on top of standard data warehouse, batch computing, realtime data streaming and ETL frameworks, we expect engineers at Allium to come in to reinvent and define improved ways to do this as most of the current existing tools are not there yet.

These are the open data problems the tech industry (and not just crypto) has to solve:

• Building a birds eye view of data quality - How does one ensure that we know the health and quality (completeness, consistency, freshness) of every single data schema delivered to every customer?
• Git for data - How does one propagate and manage scheme changes seamlessly to 100 customers using different aspects of the data?
• Reducing the cost of curiosity - How does one make the data schemas discoverable, but more importantly fun to play with?
• Observability - How do we know how our schemas are being used and help improve them?
• Activating the data - How can we build workflows to activate the data within for our customers in as seamless way as possible?

We believe because of the unique nature of Allium's business, we have the maximum incentive and chance to move faster in most advanced data governance and delivery platforms out there, and we will love for people to join us to be part of defining how the future of data engineering is done.

More Exciting Than Ever

Data teams are becoming the new product teams

The fundamental and most exciting difference between Allium and yet another data infrastructure company is that this is the first time (in recent history) that the data can be coupled with a state of the art infrastructure and sold 1000s of times. Because the blockchain is both a ledger of activity, and also a Turing machine. We sell both refined data schemas AND best in class querying infrastructure, combined, to power both applications and dashboards. This means that Allium's data infrastructure has to serve 1000s of customers versus a traditional data team's need to serve 1-2 stakeholders.

The rise of Data as a First Class citizen in companies can be seen with the surge of many new giant data governance (Monte Carlo) and delivery (Fivetran, Rudderstack) companies that have sprouted up in the past few years serving enterprises data needs. This means we operate at a scale of complexity that no off the shelf data tool can fit nicely today. We at Allium have to take the bleeding edge tools, understanding their approaches and from first principles build (or buy) solutions to match our needs.

Past Work We've Done

• Visa's Onchain Stablecoin Dashboard
• Grayscale’s State of Ethereum
• Scaling to handle Phantom's 80,000 QPS workload
• Pushing the limits of Databricks storage integrations and getting featured by Databricks' CTO Matei Zaharia
• Clustering wallet addresses to save Wormhole $MMM of token
• Detecting Bot Farms

Why join us

• Define the Standard for the industry - If you want to be part of a team that defines the enterprise data standard of the industry, this is your chance to create Reliability and Quality benchmark standards (or debt) that will echo for decades. We work with leading companies - powering Phantom Wallet's data backend, Grayscale's Research team, Magic Eden's data science team, and many more.
• Care about data problems - Allium at its heart, is helping other companies with data plumbing. The entire tech industry (not just crypto) is evolving - Data Teams are now first-class citizens (https://tomtunguz.com/data-product-teams/). This is part of your change of setting best practices for data modeling and engineering beyond crypto. Most of our internal data processes we have built extends to every other industry, we are at the forefront of this.
• Be part of the rapid change - Allium has to continually reinvent its internal and engineering processes to keep up to date with what is happening with the industry and business. You will get to learn how to ship while still upgrading existing workflows in parallel.
• Contribute to all parts of the business - Learn all cross-sections of the business, outside of your domain - whatever it takes for the team to get a win, you will be part of it.
• Giant infrastructure budget per head - You will make mistakes, costly mistakes, but at Allium's expense. We have an internal leaderboard of the costliest infrastructure mistakes made, and we learn from them. Mistakes that very few engineers in the world even have the opportunity to make. We don't have fancy Michelin-starred meal budgets, but we have a huge infrastructure budget for you to get better at your craft. And that's what counts to improve.
• Front-row seat to building a fast-accelerating startup - if you ever wanted to start your company one day, learn how to do it by being part of one; it is my (Ethan here, cofounder) commitment to mentoring you about running startups if you have any questions. I have spent most of my life devouring nearly every tech gospel book, twitter influencer thread, GPT remix of tech tenets and stories. I am more than overjoyed to share this experience in an applied setting at Allium itself every single day.

Allium’s Values & Culture

• Pro Athlete Mindset - Consistency. Day in and day out, in pursuit of excellence. A win yesterday does not guarantee (or even imply!) a win tomorrow.
• Figure It Out & Extreme Ownership - Every day is unexplored territory. There are new engineering frameworks, new legal docs, new compliance, new sales, new regulations, and new operational procedures every single day. If you don’ know it, learn it. If you can’t learn it, find someone or a product that does it. If you can’t find someone, find someone who can find someone.
• High Agency - The highest commonality between all successful people is their responsiveness, most successful billionaire CEOs still reply to emails within minutes. And when you reply, respond fast with effective solutions - and even better, resolutions. If you’re looking for a superpower, you can’t go wrong with responsiveness.
• Leading from the Front - No one is going to listen (and adopt) your suggestion unless you lead by example. It’s one thing to say We need to do XYZ this better & it’s another thing to build an MVP and say “This is the way we do things now.”
• Strong Opinions Matter - Do you want to be respected by your peers in X Y or Z? Or are you okay with being “mid”? We want people who can be leaders within their own scopes and be respected by their peers for that. [Litmus test: Is there anything professionally related that you can speak about with passion and, this is very important, get people to follow you?] Intellectual curiosity is always relevant to our mission. “Strong opinions, loosely held.”
• Lethal Business Intuition - We want people who have a keen smell of business needs and what lies ahead. Sometimes building a small feature could have 100x more leverage than a fancy architecture doc: it’s up to you to discern that in a short period of time, and that can only come from a trained intuition. If you’re unsure whether something makes business sense or not, speak up and ask anyone on the team for feedback, and refine that sense of smell.

Our Culture

• Transparency, Humility, & Candor - We have a blameless culture: diversity in counsel, unity in action. Transparency is at the core of our culture, starting from the top. Any opinion needs to be shared. That said, we don’t believe in consensus.
• Trusting & Caring - We stride in search of truth, not in search of winning points & our egos. Never pull rank. All of this can only work if you can feel comfortable being vulnerable with your colleagues; you must be able to trust them. So, assume positive intent, address behavior, not people.
• Freedom & Responsibility - Our team should have the freedom to do what is best for Allium. We want to be a company of self-disciplined, accountable people who discover and fix issues without being told to do so.
• Building Leverage - We are an ambitious team that builds for scale. We always have an eye on how to do things at scale, and we optimize our time and eliminate room for human error. A task which took a week last year should take 5 or fewer minutes this year.

Could Allium be the wrong fit for you? Allium isn't for you if you...

• Only work smart, not hard - Working smart is not enough. Everyone here works hard despite their previous success and takes nothing for granted.
• Want to cruise - At Allium, we believe talent alone does not lead to greatness. Talent with consistently applied effort is the way to superior outcomes. Even if an individual can get the job done with less effort, there is always something to improve, something more to do. There are plenty of companies out there that will let you cruise, Allium is not one of them.

About you

• You are a builder - You get joy in shipping and creating things. When people use what you've built and give you feedback, be it good or bad, you take it in and iterate.
• You are a doer - You get shit done. Quickly. And you want to work with a team of doers. No excuses, no grandstanding, no massive publicity. We take pride in getting things across the finishing line.
• You are an owner - You take pride in your work and take extreme ownership of any task, project, or area you take on.
• You are crypto curious - You don't have to be a zealot, but you see where this industry is heading and how every event of this the public nature of this movement is recorded on the chain.

Administrative Benefits

• Unlimited vacation policy - we need you at your best at all times. When you are off, be fully off and rest. When you are on, let’s get stuff done.
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance - US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents

Note: The sun never sets on Allium. We hire from any geographical location as long as they overlap 2 hours overlap on NYC ET mornings Mon-Thurs. We have people based in New York, Singapore and Australia