About this role.
Dune is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead architecture and implementation for its blockchain data foundation, including ingestion, distributed processing, and external data delivery. The role converts ambiguous product needs into well-scoped technical designs, interfaces, workflows, and sequenced engineering work. It requires deep distributed-systems expertise and hands-on development across Go, Kotlin, Rust, and Python, with strong emphasis on correctness, performance, and operability at scale. This is a highly autonomous remote role that also involves mentoring engineers and elevating design, testing, and execution practices across the team.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would begin by documenting each chain's consistency, finality, throughput, and reorganization guarantees. I would create explicit ingestion contracts with idempotent writes, durable checkpoints, replay capability, and a reconciliation path for reorgs. The platform would separate raw immutable event capture from normalized serving models so that correctness fixes and backfills can be executed safely.
I first clarify the customer outcome, constraints, non-goals, and measurable success criteria with stakeholders. I then present a lightweight design covering domain models, interfaces, risks, milestones, and trade-offs, before breaking it into independently deliverable slices. This lets the team ship a useful first version early while preserving a clear path toward the full solution.
I would evaluate duplicate delivery, late or out-of-order events, partial writes, schema evolution, backpressure, poisoned records, dependency outages, and inconsistent retries. For each, I define ownership, invariants, observability signals, and recovery procedures. The goal is to make failures detectable, bounded, and recoverable rather than relying on an assumption of exactly-once behavior everywhere.
I start with the workload and operational constraints rather than language preference. Rust may suit performance-sensitive or memory-safety-critical components, Go can be effective for concurrent services, Kotlin for JVM ecosystem integration, and Python for orchestration or analytical workflows. I also weigh team maintainability, library maturity, deployment complexity, and the long-term ownership model.
I make quality expectations scalable through clear design-review standards, reusable patterns, automated tests, operational checklists, and concise written decisions. I focus my direct involvement on high-risk architectural choices and coach engineers through the reasoning rather than taking over implementation. This improves consistency while allowing teams to retain ownership and velocity.
About Dune
Dune is on a mission to make crypto data accessible. We’re a collaborative multi-chain analytics platform used by thousands of developers, analysts, & investors to understand the on-chain world and the frontiers of finance. We’re a team of ~60 employees, working together across Europe and eastern US timezones 🌍️. We believe in our mission, and in building a powerful, open product that allows individuals and communities to do deep research into important ecosystems like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, 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 allowed us to double down on our mission. We’re using the funds to educate, reward and empower a new generation of onchain analysts aka Wizards 🧙♀️
If you want to have one of the highest impact jobs on the planet, come join our wonderful team of Galaxy brains.
Learn more about us:
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.
In this role you will
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
You might be a great fit if
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
Not required, but a plus
Experience with data lakes and formats such as Parquet, Iceberg or Deltalog
Experience at a company where the data is the product
Perks & 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
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! ✌️😎
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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.
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