Full Stack / Product Engineer

Allium makes blockchain data accurate, simple and fast

Blockchain data is hard, messy, and chaotic

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.

Accessing data is hard because blockchains are optimized for Writes and not Reads

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.

Parsing and interpreting blockchain data requires both deep domain expertise and data manipulation

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 abstracts the complexity with a simple way to query blockchain data

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.

Google and Bloomberg had to organize the world's public financial and webpage data, Allium is on a mission to do the same for blockchain data

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 :

About our customers

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.

Role

We need a product focused engineer who loves to BUILD, BUILD & BUILD! The problem statement is straightforward - we have tens of thousands of data schemas integrated in 100+ different workflows today. how does one design an experience for our customers to just get their job done in this sea of data? how does one design the right primitives that come intuitively to them?

Qualities

• do you love to build?
• do you have (some) taste?
• do you get joy from permuting and trying every combination of UI, Workflow and layout to get that perfect screen transition for the user?
• do you get annoyed when something on an app just feels that little bit off?
• do you get joy from users raving about how your product makes them feel special?
• do you have an inner diva that critiques all things design, but yet (somehow) have the humility to know that nothing's perfect?
• do you love lego? or the idea that building workflows should be as simple as stacking lego bricks?
• do you love helping users get their job done?

Don't take our word for it, what our customers say about us ()

What some ~cool people have to say about us :

Ok.. now for some tough love, here are the values we strive for at Allium :

About the team

We invite people of all backgrounds (). 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.

Administrative Benefits

Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance - US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents

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.