Software Engineer

Job description

THE 4 BIGGEST BLOCKCHAIN STRENGTHS ARE ALSO ITS WEAKNESS - Permissionless nature leads to fragmentation of meaning - Decentralization leads to too many standards https://xkcd.com/927/ - Immutability leads to exponential data + query infrastructure complexity - Neutrality means that no one is accountable for interpretations Blockchain data is public. It is not usable at institutional scale. Despite being open, blockchain data is fragmented, hard to interpret, and painful to maintain. Even a simple question like “Who are the largest Ethereum token holders over time?” can require running nodes, ingesting full chain history, decoding contracts, cleaning edge cases, and writing complex SQL. BLOCKCHAINS ARE OPTIMIZED FOR WRITES, NOT READS. They are built for consensus and execution, not searchability, standardization, or financial interpretation. Blockchains are computers, not databases https://x.com/Tim_Roughgarden/status/1512847113599729668. Every protocol defines its own schema. The same economic action can be encoded in dozens of different ways. The result: - Fragmented standards - Exponential complexity - No accountability for interpretation - Events without economic meaning Finance cannot operate on that, it needs an effective system of record. ALLIUM IS BUILDING THE SYSTEM OF RECORD FOR ONCHAIN FINANCE Allium ingests, verifies, and standardizes data across 140+ blockchains and 30+ petabytes of history. We close four structural gaps that prevent blockchains from becoming systems of record: - Semantic Gap: Translating raw events into financial concepts like payments, trades, deposits, and staking income - Standardization Gap: Mapping thousands of protocols into a single canonical cross chain schema - Infrastructure Gap: Read optimized, globally distributed data at web scale - Accountability Gap: Auditable methodology, SLAs, and SOC 1 and 2 compliance The result is a neutral, canonical data layer institutions can build on with confidence. FINANCE IS MOVING ONCHAIN Stablecoins, tokenized assets, trading, staking, and lending are growing rapidly. Institutions need a trusted source of truth for onchain financial activity, just as they rely on Bloomberg or DTCC in traditional markets. Raw blockchains cannot serve that role. As AI agents begin transacting autonomously https://x.com/AlliumLabs/status/2019810793324482901?s=20, the requirement becomes even stricter. Agents cannot reason over raw event logs. They need structured data, attribution, condition checks, and auditability. Allium is the read layer that makes onchain finance usable for humans and machines. WHO WE SERVE Allium powers three core personas with the same canonical data foundation: 1. Finance, Accounting, and Risk Teams They need reliable, audit grade answers. They rely on Allium for financial reporting, reconciliation, compliance, risk monitoring, and defensible metrics that can stand up to auditors and regulators. 2. Engineers and Product Teams They need low latency, production ready infrastructure. They use Allium to power wallets, trading systems, payment rails, staking infrastructure, and real time applications that cannot break. 3. Strategy, Research, and Executive Teams They need clarity and insight. They use Allium to understand ecosystem economics, market structure, user behavior, competitive dynamics, and where capital is flowing onchain. And of course...agents 🦞. Our customers and users include Visa, Stripe, G-SIB Banks, Big 4 Accounting firms, BCG, Coinbase, Phantom, Uniswap and cited by the Federal Reserve. ABOUT THE ROLE We love engineers who love solving new problems every single day. - Data Egress - How does one transport 100s of TBs of data around the world without breaking the piggybank? (https://www.databricks.com/blog/announcing-public-preview-delta-sharing-cloudflare-r2-integration) - Handle high traffic - How can we support the biggest applications in this industry and allow handle 100,000 QPS at peak traffic and not go down? (https://www.allium.so/post/the-inside-story-of-the-jup-airdrop-at-phantom) - Botnets - This industry is in its early days, how does one catch botnets based on their behavioral patterns? (https://www.allium.so/post/initial-report-for-the-10-6k-botnet) - Fraud (Sybil) Detection - Is it possible to transfer the same fraud detection heuristics into this blockchain world? (https://www.allium.so/post/from-eligibility-to-sybil-detection-a-deep-dive-into-wormholes-multichain-airdrop) - Who is real? - What constitutes meaningful and organic transactions on the blockchain? (https://www.allium.so/post/visa-x-allium-making-sense-of-stablecoins) - Bring Your Own Transformation - How do we let our customers design their own APIs and transform their own realtime data streams? (https://docs.allium.so/allium-app/explorer-api/quickstart) - Data Governance - We pride ourselves on our data quality - How can we ensure our data is consistent across every copy and every region 24/7? - AI and LLMs - How does one design the LLM and AI experience on top of our data to lower the barrier of entry to crypto data? (https://docs.allium.so/allium-app/allium-explorer/allium-ai-assistant) - Data Transformation Holy grail: How can one unify streaming and batch transformation logic into a single code base? If any of those bore you, we have many many more problems we have to solve! ALLIUM SIZZLE REEL 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 (try to) learn from them. We don't have fancy Michelin-starred meal budgets, but we have a huge infrastructure budget for one to get better at your craft. Why? We leverage every tool (no prereqs) out there because we meet our enterprise customers where they are at: - Every OLAP: Snowflake, Databricks, Bigquery, Clickhouse* - Every OLTP: Postgres, Aurora - Every Event bus: Kafka, SNS, PubSub - Every Cloud Provider: AWS, GCP, Azure (one day) - A copy of data in every region: US East, Central, West, Europe, Asia - Every data transformation and orchestration tool: Apache Beam, Materialize, TinyBird, DBT, SQLMesh, Temporal - Data governance tools: DataFold (if any of the names above sound like foreign Pokemon names, fret not, you can come here and catch them all, we are here to teach and make you successful.) DON'T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT, WHAT OUR CUSTOMERS SAY ABOUT US (HTTPS://WWW.ALLIUM.SO/BLOG#LOVE) https://www.allium.so/blog#love [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/2f62de56-0dd0-4792-90f8-069c5cb51068/585a3023-4036-4ec0-af76-ed3198f80890/image.png] WHAT SOME COOL PEOPLE HAVE TO SAY ABOUT US: - The Information's Top 50 Startups (https://www.allium.so/post/allium-named-to-the-informations-50-most-promising-startups-of-2025) - Mario Gabriele from The Generalist's Future 50 Startup List: https://www.allium.so/post/allium-named-awardee-of-the-generalists-inaugural-future-50-startups - Tomasz Tungus from Theory Ventures: https://tomtunguz.com/allium/ - Bucky Moore from Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com/perspectives/allium-series-a/ OK, NOW FOR SOME TOUGH LOVE. HERE ARE THE VALUES WE STRIVE FOR AT ALLIUM: - Obsessiveness - The best people at Allium cannot put a problem down once they pick it up. We care more about the work than is strictly rational. Institutions trust us because our data is right. Right means caring about the small things. The decoded contract that ships with one wrong field. The label that is 99% accurate but wrong on the address that matters. The query that runs in 4 seconds when it should run in 400 milliseconds. Most companies tolerate these. We do not. Obsessiveness shows up as depth of care. It is not measured in hours worked or visible effort. You should feel something physical when work ships half-right. That instinct is what we hire for. - 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. I hope anyone who supports a failing sports team will feel the pain (cough Man United fans) of inconsistency - 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’t 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. It is never a lack of resources, but lack of resourcefulness. - High Agency - (One of) the highest commonalities between all successful people is their responsiveness. Most successful billionaire CEOs still reply to emails within minutes (within working hours). 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. Well of course this doesn't make sense when you're an engineer coding in flow, but in general high agency of problem solving gets one very far in life - 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 should do things”. The proof of work and momentum goes a long way. - Strong Opinions On the Future (loosely held) - It is okay to be wrong, but what is not okay is not to have an idea of how a better future should be. Alliumites take pride in trying to improving everything about the company all the time. - Sense of (Allium) business smell - There are number of folks who live to eat at Allium, but the Allium smell we are talking about is that we love folks who naturally want to know why and how the work they are doing builds leverage for their teammates and also relates to the business goals ABOUT THE TEAM We invite people of all backgrounds (https://www.allium.so/about). We have engineers who learnt coding much later in life, who learnt coding on the side, we have engineers who are still in school and we also have engineers who went to the top schools (CMU, Stanford, UIUC, UPenn, Oxford, NUS, Cornell), all are welcome if one comes in with a curious mind and an infectious work ethic. [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/2f62de56-0dd0-4792-90f8-069c5cb51068/68e40347-6f06-4fcd-a99a-68f539058433/allium%20team%20montage.jpeg] [https://app.ashbyhq.com/api/images/user-content/2f62de56-0dd0-4792-90f8-069c5cb51068/1d38ca35-e23a-4c10-9a8f-8a79993c8cb3/image.png] ADMINISTRATIVE BENEFITS - Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance - US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents - Ownership - Meaningful early-stage equity. Every full-time employee receives a stock option grant so you can share directly in Allium's upside - Time off - Flexible, trust-based paid time off. We encourage people to take the rest they need. In every country we hire, our policies meet or exceed local statutory vacation requirements - Retirement - Company sponsored 401(k) plan in US so you can save pre-tax for the long term Note: The sun never sets on Allium - we hire from any geographical location as long as you are willing to overlap 2 hours overlap on NYC mornings Mon-Thurs from 10am-12pm ET. We have people based in New York, Seattle, Singapore and Australia. All applicants have to answer this pop quiz: "What is an Allium? What is your favorite Allium? https://www.allium.so/post/how-allium-got-its-name". Bonus points for the right pronunciation.