Sr.Engineer/Principal Engineer

Who?

We are Arda, a Y Combinator-backed (W22) company. We are building a DeFi-as-a-service platform: a suite of APIs that enable fintech companies to embed crypto products into their apps.

Our mission is to onboard the next billion users onto DeFi. We are doing this by providing easy to use tools for people to benefit from DeFi without having to worry about the complexity that comes with it.

What?

We are looking for founding engineers (mid and senior) who will help shape the tech, product and the culture of the company. We are a pre product-market fit company, so expect things to move fast (not a cliche) and change directions as we twist and turn to get to P-M fit.

We are tech-stack agnostic in terms of the skill sets we are looking for, but the first version will have the following (expect this to change as we scale):

1. Backend in NodeJS + Flow (or TypeScript), Mocha
2. Postgres + Sequelize
3. Frontend in React + NextJs
4. Heroku (or AWS)

You can expect to do some or all of the following:

1. Build clean, concise APIs for crypto trading and DeFi investing, along with the documentation
2. Integrate with multiple partners like exchanges, custody providers and DeFi protocols
3. Build a clean, clutter-free UI. You will also be the product designer
4. A solid double-entry ledger that tracks everything going in and out
5. Fool-proof security across the stack - encryption, hashing, privacy, VPC, etc.
6. Smart router that selects the best exchange to route depending on price, liquidity and success rates
7. Infrastructure as code - build terraform scripts and ensure easy replication of the infra across different regions
8. Research the top DeFi protocols to uncover better yields for our customers and evaluate their risk profiles, security and historical returns
9. Evaluate the portfolio exposure across the different DeFi protocols and rebalance accordingly
10. Manage production deployments, logging and monitoring

Our values

1. Fully async and remote

2. Autonomy: You can be anywhere in the world and work anytime you think you’re intense and focused.

3. Documentation and transparency: Since we are fully async, we document everything (customer calls, partnership arrangements, design, tasks) and we expect you to do the same.

4. Continuous 360 feedback: Everyone is expected to share constructive critical feedback with everyone else, including the founders. We believe it's the only way to grow.

5. Product-minded: Everyone shares the product ownership, so we expect everyone to do customer outreach, support and talk to customers for feedback and new features. All metrics will be transparent and we only ask for a proactive mindset to understand the business and see how to improve.

6. Doers over talkers: We spend time figuring out the right direction to take and then execute intensely. No one is too senior to do a job - the CTO will code every day, the CEO will sell every day and everyone takes care of customer support on a schedule. We understand the difference between real work and pretence.

7. Humanity over everything else: We sell the product to businesses, but in reality, we sell it to real humans on the other side. Our end customers are consumers using the product integrated with our APIs, so we are building the world’s most human-centric company (no pun intended). Kindness is expected and empathy is the core value we’re looking for

About you

1. Generalist, solid engineer who can learn things on your own and have an eye for clean, tested and well-documented code
2. We don’t look at the number of years of work experience as a criteria, but rather see what you have done in your life so far (side projects, open-source contributions, blogs, etc.). We don’t care about degrees, the institutions you went to or the companies you worked for before. We are open to talking as long as you have good judgment, great clarity, align with our values and have a strong track record of thoughtful work
3. Understand the fundamentals of building and integrating APIs and secure systems. Bonus if you know a bit about blockchains and protocols
4. You can be strong on the backend, front-end or can dabble everywhere. We want you to play to your strengths and will provide enough opportunities to learn and do things outside of your comfort zone
5. You can work full-time or half-time - we only ask that once you commit to doing something, you put in your focussed and honest effort to do so

The Process

If we are both interested to move forward, then you will have the following set of discussions (90 minutes each, all remote):

1. Video call with Ram: We will go into the details of the take-home assignment and the projects you’ve done. This will be technical and you can expect a response within a day of this call
2. A take-home assignment or a live-coding exercise in a language of your choice. Expect a few back and forth emails if you’re doing the take-home assignment
3. Video call with Pranay (CEO): values, culture-fit, getting to know more about you and answer your questions about Arda