Staff Software Engineer – Curated Data — Dune

The Bitcoin Street Journal; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Private medical insurance

Quarterly offsites

Annual travel allowance

Equipment stipend

Job summary

Dune, a blockchain data company, seeks a backend engineer to own the lifecycle of curated data—from raw chain data through decoding to production datasets. You will design architecture for dependency-aware orchestration, backfills, restatements, and recovery, coordinating across diverse languages and data tools.

You will be the architect who translates ambiguous product requirements into a concrete design, sequencing work for the team to deliver early while handling the hardest parts yourself.

Qualifications

• Proficient backend engineer with experience building data-centric services.
• Strong understanding of data systems, pipelines and orchestration at scale.
• Experience with SQL and modern data formats (Parquet/Orc).
• Hands-on experience in Go, Kotlin, Rust, Python and SQL.
• Ability to design end-to-end data contracts between ingestion and curation.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the control plane for the curated data lifecycle, including orchestration, backfills and retries.
• Decide, dataset by dataset, whether the answer is a model, a service or a job, and own that architecture in production.
• Design contracts between ingestion and curation for end-to-end data reasoning.
• Build data quality signals and alerting to reduce on-call noise.
• Work across Go, Kotlin, Rust, Python and SQL, selecting the right tool for the task.
• Break large problems into deliverable work and ship useful functionality early.

Skills

Backend engineering

Data systems

Distributed systems

SQL

Go

Python

Kotlin

Rust

Tools

dbt

SQLMesh

Parquet

Iceberg

Flink

Kafka Streams

Spark

Job description

• Company: Dune


• Location: United States


• Sector: Blockchain


• Source: web3.career

About Dune

Dune’s mission is to make onchain finance observable. We’re the industry standard for onchain data: a blockchain data and intelligence provider that institutions, protocols, and analysts trust to understand the onchain world and the frontiers of finance. We deliver structured datasets, spanning stablecoins, RWAs, tokens, lending, trading, and more, from 130+ chains and counting, to 1,000+ industry leaders including Visa, WisdomTree, FINRA, the IMF, Bloomberg, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Forbes, and the Financial Times.

We’re a tight knit team of ~50 hard working people, spread across Europe and eastern US timezones , having an outsized impact on the industry. We take pride in being ambitious and doing world class work while staying humble and lighthearted. We believe in building open, verifiable data that lets individuals and institutions do deep research into ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, Robinhood and many more.

We’re backed by some of the world’s best investors. In February 2022, we announced our Series B funding round led by Coatue and Union Square Ventures, an important milestone that let us double down on our mission.

If you like being challenged and want to work together with a brilliant team on an important mission, come join us.

Learn more about us:

Dune’s Vision

Values and working at Dune

https://dune.com/careers

About the role

Data Products builds and owns datasets end to end: from raw chain data through decoding to the 3000+ models and 4 petabytes we curate, share directly with customers, and replicate into their warehouses.

The role will focus on the lifecycle of building high quality data: orchestrating thousands of interdependent models, propagating schema changes without breaking downstream consumers, propagating corrections.
That is a software architecture problem in a data domain. This role is a hybrid: a backend engineer who thinks in systems and contracts, working on data.

You will be the engineer we hand ambiguous product requirements to, and will come back with a design, a sequence, and work the team can pick up, while building the hardest parts yourself.

In this role you will

Design and build the control plane for our curated data lifecycle: dependency-aware orchestration, backfills, restatements, retries, partial failure, and recovery

Decide, dataset by dataset, whether the answer is a model, a service or a job, and own that architecture through production

Design the contracts between ingestion and curation so a dataset can be reasoned about end to end

Build alerting and data quality signals that catch real problems and stay quiet otherwise, so on-call is about incidents rather than noise

Work across Go, Kotlin, Rust, Python and SQL, choosing the right tool rather than the familiar one

Break large problems into work other engineers can own, and sequence it so we ship something useful early

You might be a great fit if

You are a backend engineer who has gone deep on data systems, or a data engineer who became a strong software engineer. You ship production services, not only pipelines

You have built or materially extended orchestration and scheduling systems, and can explain precisely what breaks at scale and why

You have handled schema evolution and data correctness in a system with real consumers downstream, where a breaking change has a cost

You have built or operated stateful stream processing in production (Flink,Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming, RisingWave, Materialize, Feldera)

You have strong SQL and modeling skills on large datasets, and an interest in how the query engine underneath actually executes your work

You have solid computer science fundamentals and distributed systems understanding

You debug independently and drive root cause analysis to a fix that holds

You use AI tools well enough that they have changed how you work, you understand their failure modes and dislike ai-slop.

You communicate clearly in writing and get the best out of a distributed team

Deep experience with a transformation framework such as dbt or SQLMesh: specifically, having hit its limits and built beyond them

Data lake formats such as Parquet, Iceberg or Deltalog

Stateful stream processing in production (Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming)

Experience at a company where the data is the product

A competitive salary and equity package . Both salary and equity is top 25% of companies in the space

Our employee equity scheme has world-class employee-friendly terms with a heavily discounted strike price (~90%) and a 10-year exercise window

5 weeks PTO + local public holidays (that can be swapped to suit you)

A fully remote-first approach within a distributed team with flexible working hours; you structure your own day

Say goodbye to meeting overload! We believe in a healthy mix of async and sync work, so you can focus on what truly matters—no more wasted time on endless meetings!

Good health is important, so we offer private medical insurance, dental & vision as standard

We believe in paid parental leave to help you celebrate this important milestone, transition to your new life, and bond with your new baby. We offer 16 weeks to primary and 6 weeks to secondary caregivers, fully paid. Plus a 2-week part-time phased return at full pay to help you get used to your new (and slightly more complex!) schedule

Quarterly offsites in various exciting locations as a company or team to connect, work together and have fun (so far in Tuscany Berlin Austria and Athens).

On top of this each person gets a yearly travel allowance to connect and co-work with someone or a team of people for a few days.

An allowance for your at-home setup, to ensure you are happy, comfortable and productive. If you prefer a local co-working space, we’ll pay for your desk.

Work with some of the best people you’ll ever get to meet!

And of course, you get some awesome Dune swag!

We are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.