Senior Data Engineer
•Abacusinsights· 4h
Data ScienceFull-timeAsia
4h ago
Allium·over 3 years ago
When we started out in late 2021 our thesis was simple - blockchain data, despite it being public and free, was difficult to understand, clunky to access and troublesome to maintain. Answering a simple question like “Who are the biggest Ethereum token holders over time?” requires an engineering team to run their own RPC nodes, ingest the full history of the blockchain, clean the data, transform the data and finally summon a wizard to cast a complex SQL query.
Why is it so hard? Blockchains have historically been optimized for Writes (getting data onto the blockchain) and less for Reads (getting data OUT of the blockchain). This is because optimization efforts were focused on increasing transaction throughput and building fault tolerant and scalable consensus algorithms. This neglect makes it hard to get data out efficiently and reliably at scale.
To quote Tim Roughgarden, Columbia Professor, “Blockchains are (virtual) computers, not databases.” They are Turing machines that support general computations, and anyone can write and deploy their own smart contract for their own use case. This nearly infinite number of use cases leads to the fragmentation of data schemas for different purposes. Standardizing these schemas requires deep domain expertise to turn esoteric technical outputs into clear information for specific concepts like tokens, NFTs, stablecoins and DEXs.
Allium tames the chaos by ingesting, sanitizing, and standardizing all this data. As of this post, the data we’ve archived across 100+ blockchains is in the petabytes and growing exponentially.
This is one of the rare times in history where indexing a giant public dataset is sorely needed by all - similar to what Bloomberg did for financial data and what Google organized for public webpage data. With this indexed data, we are fortunate to support trailblazers in this industry and play some role the industry’s most exciting trends:
We serve 2 groups of customers today with the same data but different platform. Analysts who need to answer data questions about the blockchain (think BI) and Engineers who need highly reliable data queryable in near realtime (think Application backends). Our customers include the biggest institutions Visa, Stripe, Grayscale and also the biggest crypto companies such as Phantom, Uniswap. Allium is one of the unique companies in the industry that bridge blockchain and non blockchain worlds.
At Allium, Blockchain Data Wizards are the data architects who transform raw, fragmented on-chain data into elegant, meaningful abstractions that power the world's largest crypto applications.
You'll be equal parts detective, data engineer, and protocol researcher—diving deep into blockchain internals, reverse engineering DeFi protocols, and crafting data models that institutions and developers rely on.
Creating Meaningful Data Abstractions
Transform messy on-chain data into unified, intuitive data models (e.g dex.trades, lending.liquidations) that work across verticals and protocols, providing users with granular, reliable insights.
Reverse Engineer DeFi Protocol Mechanics
Dive deep into the mechanics of new DeFi protocols, dissect smart contract interactions and on-chain events, extract the data that matters, and transform it into clean, production-ready models using SQL/dbt.
Indexing New Blockchains
Dive into a blockchain’s raw data structures, ensure complete and accurate data capture, and design schemas that translate native blockchain data into reliable internal models, becoming the trusted source of truth for that ecosystem.
Building Metrics & Filtering Noise
Design and create metrics people can actually use - volumes, fees, TVL, and user activity, and filter out noise like wash trades, bots, and Sybil attacks. Make it easy for the industry to see what’s real and what matters.
Sherlock & Enola Holmes-Level Curiosity
You find peculiarities in data that others miss. You question assumptions, dig deeper when something looks off, and help the industry redefine narratives with evidence-based insights.
Product-Minded Data Design
You don't just build tables—you design data products. You think about query patterns, performance, documentation, and how end users will interact with your models.
Comfortable with Ambiguity
New blockchains and protocols have sparse documentation. You thrive when you need to figure things out yourself through exploration and experimentation.
SQL/dbt Mastery
You can write elegant, performant SQL transformations that process large volumes of data. You understand incremental models, macros, and how to build maintainable data pipelines at scale.
Co-developing methodology to identify organic and meaningful stablecoin activity, powering Visa's Stablecoin Dashboard
Reconstructing Bitcoin Ordinals data to power research work
Sybil Detection for Wormhole's Token Launch
Powering Brevan Howard Digital's stablecoin industry reports
Design chain level metrics (Fees, Activity..) for all chains
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/
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 lack of resources, but lack of resourcefulness.
High Agency - (One of) the highest commonality 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
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.
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?". Bonus points for the right pronunciation.