Kaiko is a rapidly growing fintech startup in the digital assets industry with an international presence. Our mission is to be the foundation of the new digital finance economy, which promises to expand financial opportunity and inclusion globally. We do this by empowering market participants with accurate, transparent, and actionable crypto data to be leveraged for a range of market activities including strategy backtesting, in-depth research, valuation, analytics, and integrations.
About the Job
Overview
You will be joining a fast-paced engineering team made up of people with significant experience working with terabytes of data. We believe that everybody has something to bring to the table, and therefore put collaborative effort and team-work above all else (and not just on the engineering side). Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is on track to revolutionize how the financial sector works, through an entirely new system of technologically enforced contract guarantees. As a Blockchain Engineer, you develop and maintain services needed to interact with existing and future blockchains, to support Kaiko’s collection growth towards new types of data and new data sources.
You will be able to work autonomously as an equally trusted member of the team, in close relationship with the other engineers, and participate in efforts such as:
+ Extracting valuable data from various DeFi protocols
+ Addressing “big data” problems: the current head of ethereum blockchain is at 13M+, how do we index that data and query it efficiently? How do we support data from multiple blockchains ?
+ Working on Smart Contracts and Oracles : we partner with Chainlink, Tezos and Flux today
Our Stack
+ Geth and Solidity
+ Messaging: Kafka
+ Service deployment: Terraform, Nomad (plugged with Consul and Vault)
+ Database systems: ClickHouse, PostgreSQL
+ Services protocol: gRPC
+ Platforms (packaged in Docker containers): Golang, Python (phasing out in favor of Golang), Ruby (phasing out in favor of Golang)
Your Missions
+ Design, develop and deploy scalable and observable backend microservices tailored for Blockchain, DEXs and DeFi data collection (trades, liquidity pools, hash rate, tokens, transactions...)
+ Understand DeFi protocols to be able to extract informations from them
+ Work hand-in-hand with the business team and the engineering team on developing new features, addressing issues and extending the platform
+ Work on Oracles to provide on-chain data
+ Occasionally design, develop and deploy smart contracts
Who We Are Looking For
+ Good understanding of Blockchain technologies and a general interest and curiosity about crypto currencies (we are focusing on Ethereum now but other blockchains will come soon)
+ Some experience of setting up your own node, maintaining it and querying it
+ An ability to read and understand smart contracts (Solidity and Vyper for now) and to interact with them for quick prototyping
+ Some understanding of the existing DeFi protocols: Curve, Balancer, AMMs, Aave, Aggregators ... Ideally, you have used and integrated these protocols before either with your own smart contract or a DApp
+ You can find your way around on online blockchain explorers like etherscan
+ You can abstract the complexity of low-level smart contract interactions through scripting and rest APIs
+ You can learn fast! DeFi is changing constantly
+ Significant experience as a Software/Data/DevOps Engineer (several years of experience on multiple projects), ideally in Go (not a strong prerequisite though)
+ Knowledgeable about data ingestion pipelines and massive data querying
+ Worked with, in no particular order: microservices architecture, self-managed services (eg. deploy and maintain our own databases), distributed services, server-side development, etc
Please note that we don’t have any “hard” requirements in terms of development platforms or technologies: we are primarily interested in people capable of adapting to an ever changing landscape of technical requirements, who learn fast and are not afraid to constantly push our technical boundaries. It is not uncommon for us to benchmark new technologies for a specific feature, or to change our infrastructure in a big way to better suit our needs.
Nice to Have
+ Experience developing financial product methodologies for indices, reference rates, and exchange rates
+ Knowledgeable about the technicalities of financial market data, such as the difference between: calls, puts, straddles, different types of bonds, swaps, CFD, CDS, options, futures, etc
+ Additional experience in blockchains: use of multiple protocols or different blockchains
Personal Skills
+ Honest, getting and giving feedback is very important to you
+ Humble, making new errors is an essential part of your journey
+ Empathetic, you feel a sense of responsibility for all the team’s endeavors and don’t pay attention to the individual level of involvement
+ Committed, as an equally important member of the team, you want to make yourself heard while respecting everybody’s point of view
+ Fluent in written and spoken English (we have 5 different nationalities in the team!)
+ You have the utmost respect for legacy code and infrastructure, with some occasional and perfectly understandable respectful complaints
We do our best to select people that lead by example and experience rather than by position or seniority.
Company Perks
+ Hardware of your choice
+ Paid vacations (and French RTT)
+ Health insurance (Alan Blue, 75% subsidized by Kaiko)
+ Meal vouchers (Swile, 10€/day)
+ Multiple team events (annual retreat, casual events, etc)
Recruitment Process
+ Introduction call (30mins)
+ Meeting with a senior Blockchain Engineer as well as another senior member of the Engineering team for a technical/product RPG: you read that right, no written test, no whiteboard quicksort implementation (1h30)
+ Informal discussions with other members of the company working in sales, product, research, marketing, etc (45mins)
+ Meeting with our Head of Engineering
Each step is generally held on a different day, we do our best to follow-up in the next 24 hours, and we always provide the candidates with a thorough explanation of our decision.
Additional Information
+ Contract type: Full Time (French CDI)
+ Location: On-site at our Paris office or Full Remote (CEST +/-1h)
Interested? Reach out to us at engineering@kaiko.com.
