Distributed Systems Engineer

What We’re Looking For

To grow our engineering team working on The Graph, we are looking for experienced, self-driven engineers interested in working on highly distributed and decentralized server and database systems as well as command-line tools.

The engineering team builds and maintains the software that makes up The Graph's hosted service and The Graph Network. This includes components for building, deploying, indexing and querying blockchain data through subgraphs, for serving paid queries in the network, for automating indexer decisions in the network, as well as a variety of internal and public command line tools.

The Graph is the backbone of decentralized finance (DeFi) and web3, a new kind of internet based on decentralized protocols. It serves billions of requests from production apps every month. In addition to a great developer and user experience, our focus is developing software that provides fast, deterministic, verifiable, financially incentivized and secure indexing and querying of blockchain data.

The recently launched Graph Network has become one of the major protocols in the space, with hundreds of millions of dollars staked in an open data market.

Responsibilities

• Plan, develop, test and ship new features and improvements to software components powering The Graph Network and hosted service.
• Work with research and product teams to build great developer and user experiences that are consistent across all parts of the protocol and incorporate the latest results from our research team.
• Interact with and support our growing community of developers and network participants, such as decentralized app developers and indexers.
• Review the work done by other team members.

Desired skills

• Experience in creating and maintaining complex distributed, concurrent and low-level software systems. The Graph is a decentralized protocol in which a lot of pieces work together.
• Experience in working with external contributors and community members. We collaborate and interact with our growing community of developers and indexers every day. A high quality bar, attention to detail and excellent communication skills are key aspects in how we work.
• Strong sense of ownership. We trust everyone on the team a great deal. A big part of that is that our engineers own the topics they work on, raise issues early and see implementations through from start to finish.
• Experience with low-level languages like C/C++ and languages with advanced type systems such as Rust, TypeScript or Haskell. Particularly relevant areas/tech include: PostgreSQL and databases in general, asynchronous programming and threads, microservice architectures, performance optimizations, caching, and API frameworks such as GraphQL. Experience with Ethereum and other blockchain nodes and their public APIs is a plus.

Strongly Recommended

We are looking for engineers with a background in at least one of the following areas, and encourage applicants to indicate in which of these areas they are most interested in expanding their expertise:

• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, NGINX and other infrastructure technologies.
• Knowledge of cryptography and security best practices. The hosted service and Graph Network are running in production. Hashing, signing, cryptographic proofs and verification play a big role in the security and correctness of the network.
• Experience with testing highly distributed systems that involve a number of components and complex networking.
• Interest in learning Rust and experience with JavaScript or TypeScript, as these are the languages that our software is written in.

About The Team

Edge & Node is a globally distributed team. We work hard, but our remote-first team affords a high degree of autonomy and flexibility. Our few scheduled meetings tend to be in the morning, pacific standard time (PST). Most of our team, even at the individual contributor level, has started companies or led large teams and it shows in the way that people manage their own productivity. We’re mission-oriented, and hold one another accountable with results rather than vanity metrics like time spent at your desk. If you need to book a vacation, or make a doctor’s appointment, go for an afternoon run, or even just get some fresh air, we trust you to use your time effectively.

Despite being remote-first, our team is fairly tight-knit and often feels like a family. You can expect quarterly offsites (once Covid permits) in different parts of the world, where we strategize as a team, brainstorm around a whiteboard, go on team outings, have spirited and varied conversations over wine, coffee, or kombucha, and get to know each other on a personal level. We value diversity and bringing your whole self to work, including your weird hobbies, unique life experiences, cultural traditions, obscure music tastes, and whatever else makes you *you*. In addition to offsites, you’ll have the option to travel to conferences and meetups around the world, where you’ll get to know individual teammates on a more personal level and also build relationships with our users and community.

We pay competitive salaries to all team members, based on level of contribution and country of residence, and offer generous health benefits to U.S. based employees.

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