Web3 Staff Full Stack Python Engineer, Institutional Trading Platform (Contract)

BlockFi is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Institutional Platforms Engineering team!

About the Team

The Institutional Trading Platform Engineering team is focused on building a crypto platform for our Institutional trading business. You will partner closely with the operations team and product to build capabilities that will facilitate the movement of multi-billion worth of assets internally and externally by integrating with multiple internal and third-party platforms. You will also shape tools and products that allow us to effectively track and report all the transactions across platforms. The team’s technical stack is TypeScript, React, & Python (Backend) with services hosted on AWS. 

We’re building the core services that power our business and help manage the multi-billion worth of assets. We are pragmatic problem solvers that are excited to tackle some of the most interesting challenges in the Crypto-FinTech arena.   

Your Mission

As a Staff Engineer, you will tackle hands-on, high-impact work as we develop a platform built for a global scale. You will act as the technical leader for a team, identify and define problems, design and implement technical solutions and tools, and mentor and teach more junior engineers. We are looking for proactive, collaborative, and adaptive engineers who have real-world distributed systems experience at scale. 

• Architect/Design: - Create architecture and formulate design decisions for your services that are aligned with your business vision and meet quality criteria.- Work with diverse stakeholders to ensure our systems are built for availability, reliability, resilience, scalability, performance, and security from the ground up.- Write design proposals and review proposals from other engineers. Ensure tradeoffs are clearly and publicly documented.

• Deliver and Own Solutions: - Responsible for creating and executing on plans and designs end to end at a team level: estimating, prototyping, implementing, testing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting high-quality software in production.- Work with stakeholders to understand and document both functional and quality attribute requirements.- Ensure that teams adhere to quality standards through cross-team communication, mentoring, code review, and backlog grooming.- Accountable for system availability and monitoring system health; ensure alerts, metrics, and runbooks are in place; and debug issues in production.
• Lead:- Technical leader of a team, with significant technical and cultural impact beyond that team.- Guide engineers in focusing on outcomes and carefully considering business goals, tradeoffs, quality attributes, cross-cutting concerns, and risks.- Continuously improve engineering standards, processes, planning, solutions, and efficiency. - Listen to and guide debates to help reach a consensus. Once a decision is made, clearly communicate and support that decision.
• Adapt: - Quickly learn new tools and technologies, develop an understanding of existing systems, and identify and tackle high-impact work.- Proactively seek to learn about the company, products, processes, and culture. Align technical decisions with business goals.

Your Expertise

• Technical Breadth as well as Depth in Several Areas: - 6+ years of industry experience designing, and building production applications - You have a good understanding and experience with one of the Python application frameworks, preferably FastAPI.- You have solid experience with frontend Javascript frameworks like React- Deep knowledge and experience with the Amazon AWS ecosystem.- Nice to have some experience with GraphQL.- Developing and maintaining unit and automation tests is important to you.- Able to clearly identify, communicate, and document technical tradeoffs, and guides others to do the same. - As a bonus, mentoring, sharing knowledge and technical presentations are exciting to you

• Technical Ownership: Experience owning software systems end-to-end, designing, estimating, implementing, testing, maintaining, debugging, and supporting high-quality software in production.
• Communication: Excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills. Able to listen and learn from as well as explain complex ideas to stakeholders of varying levels of technical expertise.
• Collaboration: Demonstrable experience with establishing strong relationships with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, integrating a variety of perspectives (end users, product, engineering, etc.). Empathetic and does the legwork required for building consensus. Always seeks out feedback on technical designs and solutions.
• Initiative and focus on outcomes: Prepared to take on high-impact work across contexts and as the need arises, working independently and taking initiative while maintaining transparency and collaboration. Proactively identifies problems and comes to conversations with possible solutions. 
• Adaptive: Ability and motivation to quickly learn new languages, technologies, and tools. Pragmatic bias toward outcomes, and technical decisions that solve real business problems.