Staff Software Engineer - Data Foundation

Unchain Data; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary and equity

Equity plan terms

PTO 5 weeks

Remote-first

Health insurance

Dental & vision

Parental leave

Offsites

Travel allowance

Home office allowance

Co-working stipend

Company swag

Job summary

Dune seeks a data-centric engineer to join the Data Foundation and own critical data ingestion, representation, and delivery. You will work on large distributed data systems, design end-to-end components, and tackle the hardest parts yourself in a fully distributed team.

You will collaborate across Go, Kotlin, Rust, and Python, aiming for correct, scalable, and observable data pipelines while shaping the product and engineering processes in a remote-first environment.

Qualifications

• Strong generalist with computer science fundamentals.
• Ability to reason from first principles and handle ambiguity.
• Experience designing/shipping distributed data systems.
• Ability to work across Go, Kotlin, Rust and Python stacks.

Responsibilities

• Turn product requirements into technical requirements and define interfaces.
• Break large problems into work for engineers and sequence delivery.
• Drive high-impact architectural decisions across the data platform.
• Design for correctness and performance under high data volume.
• Mentor distributed-team engineers and uphold code quality.

Skills

Generalist

CS fundamentals

Distributed systems

Go

Kotlin

Rust

Python

Job description

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.

About The Role

Data Foundation owns how blockchain data enters Dune, how it is represented and how it's delivered externally. This is a role that involves thinking about large distributed data systems, recognising traditional scaling patterns and software lifecycle pitfalls, and is ideal for anyone passionate about those topics.

You will be the engineer we hand ambiguous product requirements to, and will be comfortable coming back with a design, a sequence, and a set of tasks the team can pick up as well as building the hardest parts yourself.

Responsibilities

• Turn product requirements into technical requirements: model the domain, define the interfaces and the workflows, and navigate trade-offs
• Break large problems into work other engineers can own, and sequence it so we ship something useful early
• Drive high-impact architectural decisions across the data platform, and own components end to end from design through production
• Work across our stack, mainly Go, Kotlin, Rust and Python where they fit, choosing the right tool rather than the familiar one
• Design for correctness and performance under real volume: large-scale ingestion, distributed processing, and data lake storage
• Raise the bar on design reviews, testing, and how the team breaks work down
• Mentor engineers by example, in a fully distributed team

Requirements

• You are a strong generalist with real computer science fundamentals, and you use them to adapt quickly to new technologies and problem spaces
• You reason from first principles: you make assumptions explicit, identify the constraints and invariants that matter, and derive the solution rather than reaching for a familiar pattern
• You use computer science fundamentals as practical tools. You have designed and shipped distributed data systems, making their contracts, state transitions, invariants, and failure modes explicit. You know their fault models and scaling weaknesses
• You are comfortable with ambiguity: you will talk to product, to customers, and to the team, then commit to a scope and defend it
• 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

Nice to Have

• Experience with data lakes and formats such as Parquet, Iceberg or Deltalog
• Experience at a company where the data is the product

Benefits

• 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
• A healthy mix of async and sync work, so you can focus on what truly matters—no more wasted time on endless meetings
• Private medical insurance, dental and vision as standard
• Paid parental leave: 16 weeks to primary and 6 weeks to secondary caregivers, fully paid, plus a 2-week part-time phased return at full pay
• Quarterly offsites in various exciting locations as a company or team to connect, work together and have fun
• 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
• 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.