Founding Engineer – Full Stack

At Shadow, we’re building the end-to-end data platform for crypto.

Blockchain networks are the next evolution of the Internet, yet it’s much too difficult to work with onchain data today. We’re taking a crypto-native approach to reimagine blockchain data infrastructure from the ground up, starting with a product that allows anyone to extract custom data from any smart contract.

We've raised $9M in seed funding led by Paradigm, with additional angels from Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, and Flashbots.

We're a small team who primarily works out of a beautiful office space in NYC.

We’re hiring a founding full stack engineer to join our world-class team.

About the role

In this role you’ll be working closely with the CEO, CTO, and product design to build Shadow's user-facing products. You should get excited about building data-rich applications for a technical user group (engineers, data scientists, and researchers).

What you'll do (responsibilities)

We're looking for an experienced IC who wants to:

Own the product. You're a technical founder type and will have autonomy and responsibility. You’ll own Shadow’s customer-facing application (no PMs) and will be highly involved in shaping the roadmap and product strategy.

Ship, ship, ship. Launch new user-facing products and features that build on top of Shadow’s infrastructure to 10x the experience of interacting with onchain data.

Act on strongly held devex opinions: We are building a technical product for a technical audience, and you’ll get to build the thing you always wanted to use yourself.

Our tech stack

• Backend infrastructure built in Rust

• Kubernetes on GCP

• Kafka, BigTable, Postgres, Snowflake/BigQuery

• Typescript and Next.js

• Solidity and Vyper

What we're looking for (qualifications)

You're an ambitious senior or staff-level IC that has built technically oriented or data-rich user-facing applications. We’re looking for someone that feels a deep sense of duty to the users of their work.

Design sensibility. While you’ll be working with very talented designers, we expect you to have a knack for great UX. If you feel something in the product is off, you go and fix it without asking for permission.

Interest in onchain data and data analysis. You’ve spent way too much time on Etherscan, Dune, and other onchain data applications. You understand what they do well, where they fall short, and why that is.

Curious and quick learning. We don't expect you to have experience in every technology we use, but to learn and be productive quickly. We value people who can quickly obtain a deep technical understanding of new domains. Owning several services and jumping into all of them doesn't scare you.

Pragmatic attention to detail. You hold your work to a high standard. You strive for few slips in code, clean Git hygiene, and clear written communication — all while remaining low-ego and solution oriented.

Good heart. We are a group of friendly ambitious nerds who are effortlessly kind to one another, and we don't tolerate jerks.

Why join

Team — we have a high bar; you'll be on a small team of extremely talented individuals.

Impact — work on stuff that actually matters and will grow crypto as a whole.

Ownership — you will have an extreme level of autonomy over your work.

Who you'll be working with

Emily (Co-Founder and CTO) — Previously Paradigm EIR, and Staff Engineer → Engineering Manager at Airbnb, where she built the realtime indexer for user profiling used sitewide and managed a team of 15 engineers. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi summer 2020.

Alvin (Co-Founder and CEO) — Previously Paradigm EIR, and Designer → Staff Product Manager at Airbnb, where he was the first PM on Airbnb Plus and helped take it from a whiteboard idea to a $100M/yr business in 2.5 years. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi Summer 2020.

Emily and Alvin are siblings and have worked together for the past 8 years!

What we offer (compensation & benefits)

Highly competitive salary and equity — we target 90th percentile compensation for both salary and equity. You’ll be expected to act like an owner, because you are one.

Great healthcare — gold-tier company healthcare plans. We cover 99% of medical, dental, vision premiums for employees, and 50% for dependents.

401k — flexible 401k retirement plan with contribution matching.

Hardware setup — we’ll buy whatever you need to be productive.