Senior Staff Engineer, Infrastructure and Platform Architecture

What is BlockFi?

BlockFi's mission is to provide liquidity, transparency and efficiency to digital financial markets by creating products that meet the needs of consumers and corporations across the globe. We build bridges between traditional finance and digital markets that enable growth for all participants.

We're a team of builders and strivers, proud to champion financial inclusivity and offer economic opportunities around the globe. We provide the same inclusivity to our team members. BlockFi is a place where diversity is celebrated, individuality is recognized, and every single team member is valued. We are changing the status quo to be the first financial company that people love, and we rely on our people to make it happen!

BlockFi is looking for Senior Staff Engineers to join our Architecture Team!

About Your Team

The Architecture Team at BlockFi plays a crucial role in designing and communicating company-wide architectural strategy and setting architectural guidelines across the engineering organization. Our members work collaboratively with stakeholders and developers to influence the architecture of systems running in production and act as integral & embedded members of the engineering teams they interact with.

Your Mission

You'll work closely with engineering and infrastructure teams to help clarify and improve the architecture of our systems as well as designing and communicating company-wide architectural strategy. We are looking for proactive, collaborative, and hands-on engineers who have built cloud infrastructure from the ground up and have real world distributed systems experience at scale.

• Architect/Design:
  • Develop strategies, write proposals for new architectures, systems, and processes, and communicate them to diverse stakeholders in terms they can understand.
  • Work with diverse stakeholders to ensure our systems are built for quality attributes like availability, reliability, resilience, scalability, performance, and security from the ground up.
  • Mentor teams on design proposals, tradeoff analyses, and design review practices. Ensure significant design decisions are publicly documented with tradeoffs clearly described.
  • Facilitate cross-team and cross-functional communication to specify the problem domain, business goals, quality attribute requirements, and timelines for committing to architectural decisions.
• Deliver and Own Solutions:
  • Enable early and continuous delivery of business value, integrating across technical (development, infrastructure, security, QA, SRE, etc.) and non-technical functions.
  • Identify problems before they happen across systems/domains.
  • Build prototypes, models, and scaffolding for new technologies.
  • Ensure that teams adhere to quality standards through cross-team communication, mentoring, code review, and backlog grooming.
• Lead:
  • Act as a multiplier by developing patterns, systems, standards, and tools that increase productivity across engineering.
  • Lead conversations about technical direction across large portions of our technology. Listen and guide debates to help reach consensus across teams; once a decision is made, clearly communicate and support that decision.
  • Build relationships across domains and business functions.
  • Think one or two years in the future, and develop prototypes to explore solutions to longer-term problems.
  • Guide tech leads and team members in carefully considering business goals, trade-offs, quality attributes, cross-cutting concerns, and risks prior to committing to design decisions.
  • Continuously improve engineering standards, processes, planning, solutions, and efficiency.
• Adapt:
  • Quickly learn new tools and technologies, develop an understanding of existing systems, and identify and tackle high impact work.
  • Avoid dogmatic positions on technical questions.
  • Proactively seek to learn about the company, products, processes, and culture. And align technical decisions with business goals.

Your Expertise

• Technical Breadth as well as Depth in Several Areas: 8+ years of industry experience working with, designing, and building distributed systems at scale, with 5+ years in cloud infrastructure. Able to clearly identify, communicate, and document technical tradeoffs, and guides others to do the same. Understands that there is no single best technical solution, and is able to recognize these tradeoffs across our systems in light of business strategy. Deep expertise across the technology stack from network to database to application.
• 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.
• Pragmatic: Ability and motivation to quickly learn new technologies and systems. Pragmatic bias toward outcomes, and technical decisions that solve real business problems. Not afraid to question assumptions and tackle challenges under conditions of uncertainty.

Your Perks:

We benefit from the great work our employees do each day. That is why we are committed to providing a variety of awesome benefits to help them live their best lives.

• Competitive salary because we value your experience and expertise
• Unlimited vacation / sick days because everyone deserves time for R&R
• Employer contribution towards health coverage (including vision & dental) because your physical health and well-being is important to us
• Various fringe benefits such as 401k, Parental Leave, FSA/HSA, and Employee Assistance Programs because health coverage is more than just choosing your yearly plan
• Flexible work environment because we are a geographically dispersed team and we believe in balance
• Pet insurance because all of your beloved family members should have coverage too
• A close-knit team of enthusiastic, collegial and driven people to work alongside because teamwork makes the dreamwork

Why BlockFi?

BlockFi has experienced incredible growth since our launch in August 2017. Our client base has grown to more than 225,000 (and counting), and the company now boasts more than $15 billion in assets on our platform. We recently completed a Series D funding round placing the company's valuation at $3 billion, and our team now has more than 500 people worldwide. We have established ourselves as a crypto market leader, and as we expand our product suite and geographic footprint, we expect our addressable market to grow exponentially.

BlockFi's leadership team has decades of experience in the traditional financial services and banking world, and we take a conservative approach to regulation that will position us well for sustainable long-term growth and expansion.

Our team is comprised of highly motivated professionals from diverse backgrounds. We are aiming to become the leading lender in crypto and are poised to redefine the global financial ecosystem for the better. In addition:

• BlockFi is one of the first companies to ever offer crypto-backed loans and the only company whose founding team has an institutional understanding of the debt capital markets and regulatory landscape in the U.S.
• $100 MM of Series A, B, and C funding led by Valar Ventures with participation from Susquehanna, Winklevoss Capital, Fidelity, Galaxy Digital, Akuna Capital, and Morgan Creek
• $350 MM of Series D funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, partners of DST Global, Pomp Investments and Tiger Global
• We are moving quickly and have already deployed substantial capital into the space, proving our ability to execute and capture customer demand

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