Senior Data Scientist - DeFi Blockchain / On-Chain Surveillance

TWG Global AI; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

TWG AI in Santa Monica/New York seeks an experienced on-chain engineer to own ingestion, attribution, and oracle surveillance. You will decode settlement mechanics, integrate wallet-clustering feeds, and trace funds across chains to strengthen our DeFi integrity stack.

Ideal candidates bring deep EVM/Polygon data fluency, on-chain data engineering expertise, and a surveillance mindset to build robust detection capabilities across multiple chains.

Qualifications

• Experience reading and decoding on-chain transactions and events.
• Experience indexing chain data at scale for detectors and graphs.
• Experience tracing funds across chains for provenance and surveillance.
• Knowledge of DeFi mechanics (flash loans, lending, AMMs).
• Familiarity with wallet-clustering attribution tooling.
• Understanding UMA / optimistic-oracle mechanisms.
• Surveillance and attribution mindset when researching wallets.

Responsibilities

• Own the on-chain ingestion path end to end—indexing events, settled fills, transfers, and outcomes.
• Decode the venue's settlement mechanics and the composability layer around it.
• Own the attribution substrate by integrating wallet clustering feeds and graph the identity layer.
• Trace funds across chains and bridges for provenance and funding-source surveillance.
• Co-own the optimistic-oracle surveillance R&D.
• Feed on-chain features and cluster signals into the shared detection stack.

Skills

EVM / Polygon data

On-chain data engineering

Cross-chain tracing

DeFi literacy

Chainalysis attribution tooling

UMA / optimistic-oracle understanding

Surveillance mindset

Tools

Subgraphs / GraphQL

Raw-node indexing

Wallet-clustering feeds

Job description

The Organization

At TWG AI, we drive innovation and business transformation across a range of industries—including financial services, insurance, technology, media, and sports—by leveraging data and AI as core assets. Our AI-first, cloud-native approach delivers real-time intelligence and interactive business applications, empowering informed decision-making for both customers and employees.

We prioritize responsible data and AI practices, ensuring ethical standards and regulatory compliance. Our decentralized structure enables each business unit to operate autonomously, supported by a central AI Solutions Group, while strategic partnerships with leading data and AI vendors fuel game-changing efforts in marketing, operations, and product development.

You will collaborate with management to advance our data and analytics transformation, enhance productivity, and enable agile, data-driven decisions. By leveraging relationships with top tech startups and universities, you will help create competitive advantages and drive enterprise innovation.

At TWG, your contributions will support our goal of sustained growth and superior returns, as we deliver rare value and impact across our businesses.

The Role

This role owns the on-chain substrate the entire DeFi Integrity Engine stands on — ingestion, attribution integration, composability decoding — and co-owns the UMA oracle-surveillance R&D. It was one seat when DeFi was a workstream; it is two now that DeFi is a standalone SOW with its own go-live date, because a single owner across ingestion + attribution + composability + oracle R&D is a bus-factor risk on a contractual milestone.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the on-chain ingestion path end to end — indexing contract events, settled fills, transfers, and resolution outcomes at scale, and turning them into the versioned tables detection and validation consume.
• Decode the venue's settlement mechanics and the composability layer around it.
• Own the attribution substrate: evaluate and integrate commercial wallet-clustering feeds, fuse them with on-chain behavioral clustering, and deliver a confidence-scored entity layer that carries the identity load on a pseudonymous venue.
• Trace funds across chains and bridges for provenance and funding-source surveillance.
• Co-own the optimistic-oracle surveillance R&D.
• Feed on-chain features and cluster-grain signals into the shared detection stack.

Qualifications:

• EVM / Polygon fluency at the data level — reading and decoding on-chain transactions and events, understanding how Polymarket's contracts settle (the CTF conditional-token framework, the USDC→collateral flow, ERC-1155 outcome-token transfers). This is the load-bearing skill; everything else sits on it.
• On-chain data engineering — pulling and indexing chain data at scale (subgraphs / GraphQL, raw-node indexing, or equivalent), turning it into the tables the detectors and the graph specialists consume.
• Cross-chain / bridge tracing — following funds as they move across chains, for provenance and composability surveillance.
• DeFi mechanism literacy — flash loans, lending markets, leverage, AMMs — enough to reason about how someone would use these to manipulate or fund manipulation.
• Chainalysis (or comparable) attribution tooling — evaluating and integrating the wallet-clustering feed that anchors the Attribution Substrate replacing the KYC/identity layer on the DeFi side.
• UMA / optimistic-oracle understanding — how the resolution and dispute mechanism works, for the net-new oracle-surveillance R&D.
• Surveillance / attribution mindset — the rare part: most on-chain engineers come from building protocols or trading, not from investigating them. Someone who thinks about "who is really behind these wallets and what are they doing" rather than "how do I ship this vault."

Position Location:

This is an onsite position based out of our Santa Monica, CA or New York, NY offices.

Compensation:

The base pay for this position is $190,000-290,000. A bonus will be provided as part of the compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.

TWG is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.