Senior Software Engineer, Data Services San Francisco New York

Alchemy; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private Health Insurance

Gym Reimbursement

Commuter Benefits

Flexible Time Off

In-Office Group Meals

Learning & Development Stipend

Company Sponsored Conferences & Events

Books & Audiobook subscription with

Job summary

Alchemy is seeking a backend data systems engineer to build and operate ingestion, indexing, storage, and API-serving systems for blockchain data. You will own end-to-end backend components, ensuring data correctness, freshness, and fast querying while collaborating with product and customer-facing teams to meet developer needs.

You will focus on production reliability, performance, and cost, with ownership of monitoring, runbooks, and incident response.

Qualifications

• Track record of designing, shipping, and operating production backend or distributed data systems.
• Strong programming skills in a production backend language, plus experience with databases, indexing, and query performance.
• Experience reasoning about consistency, partitioning, asynchronous processing, and failure recovery.
• Ability to diagnose production problems and improve the system beyond the immediate fix.
• Sound API design judgment, including compatibility, pagination, error handling, and data contracts.
• Clear communication and the ability to turn an ambiguous customer problem into a scoped engineering project.
• Blockchain experience is helpful, but not required.
• You should be interested in learning how chain behavior affects data correctness.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate blockchain ingestion, indexing, storage, and API-serving systems.
• Handle reorganizations, retries, duplicate events, and historical backfills without silently losing or corrupting data.
• Improve query performance and data freshness. Make those properties observable to the team and understandable to customers.
• Extend API capabilities and chain coverage, with tests for differences in chain behavior and data semantics.
• Develop streaming and event-delivery capabilities with explicit guarantees for ordering, replay, and failure recovery.
• Reduce the cost of storing, processing, and serving data through measured changes to architecture and query execution.
• Participate in production support and incident response for the systems you own. Maintain monitoring, runbooks, safe rollouts, and fixes that prevent recurrence.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed data systems

APIs design

Databases

Indexing

Query performance

Problem diagnosis

Tools

ClickHouse

Kafka

Job description

About Alchemy

Alchemy is the Web3 infrastructure and developer platform that powers millions of users and the world’s most innovative blockchain applications. From enabling $1+ trillion in financial transactions worldwide to scaling L2s and enabling DeFi, Alchemy provides the infrastructure and tools developers need to build reliable, scalable, and accessible experiences.

Trusted by companies like JPMorgan, Stripe, Visa, Franklin Templeton, Nike, and backed by a16z, Coatue, Silver Lake, Lightspeed, and Stanford University, Alchemy is building the foundational layer for a decentralized and AI-enabled Web3 ecosystem. For more information, visit alchemy.com.

The Role

Build the systems that turn blockchain activity into data developers can use. Alchemy’s Data Services work includes token, portfolio, and transfer APIs, with streaming in the updated roadmap.

You will own backend projects from ingestion through serving, making data correct, fresh, and fast to query. You will work with Product and customer-facing teams to understand what developers need, then ship improvements and measure their effect on reliability, performance, and cost.

What You Will Do

• Build and operate blockchain ingestion, indexing, storage, and API-serving systems.
• Handle reorganizations, retries, duplicate events, and historical backfills without silently losing or corrupting data.
• Improve query performance and data freshness. Make those properties observable to the team and understandable to customers.
• Extend API capabilities and chain coverage, with tests for differences in chain behavior and data semantics.
• Develop streaming and event-delivery capabilities with explicit guarantees for ordering, replay, and failure recovery.
• Reduce the cost of storing, processing, and serving data through measured changes to architecture and query execution.
• Participate in production support and incident response for the systems you own. Maintain monitoring, runbooks, safe rollouts, and fixes that prevent recurrence.

What We Are Looking For

• A track record of independently designing, shipping, and operating production backend or distributed data systems.
• Strong programming skills in a production backend language, plus experience with databases, indexing, and query performance.
• Experience reasoning about consistency, partitioning, asynchronous processing, and failure recovery.
• Evidence that you can diagnose a production problem and improve the system beyond the immediate fix.
• Sound API design judgment, including compatibility, pagination, error handling, and data contracts.
• Clear communication and the ability to turn an ambiguous customer problem into a scoped engineering project.

Blockchain experience is helpful, but not required. You should be interested in learning how chain behavior affects data correctness.

Helpful Experience

• ClickHouse or other analytical databases; Kafka or similar streaming systems.
• Blockchain indexers, EVM logs and traces, finality, or non-EVM data models.
• Developer-facing data APIs, real-time delivery, or large historical datasets.
• Storage migrations and performance or cost optimization under production traffic.

What Success Looks Like

Within three months:

• You have shipped a customer-facing improvement and can show its effect on data quality, freshness, latency, or cost.
• You own a production component, have tested its recovery behavior, and have proposed the next improvement using operational evidence and developer feedback.

Benefits & Perks

Private Health Insurance

Gym Reimbursement

Commuter Benefits

Flexible Time Off

In-Office Group Meals

Learning & Development Stipend

Company Sponsored Conferences & Events

Books & Audiobook subscription with Bookster