Senior Data Engineer

About the role

Merkle Science builds blockchain transaction monitoring and intelligence solutions for web3 companies, digital asset service providers, financial institutions, law enforcement and government agencies. It is headquartered in New York with offices in Singapore, Bangalore and London. The Senior Data Engineer designs, builds and runs the systems behind the data products, covering ingestion, processing, analytical storage and serving, owning the work from design document through to production.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, high-throughput data pipelines and platform systems for blockchain data across 30+ chains.
• Build backend data services and loaders in Go and Python.
• Design and evolve data models and analytical workloads in ClickHouse, tuned for sub-second queries.
• Build incremental, idempotent pipelines on Databricks over billions of rows and tens of terabytes.
• Improve the scale, reliability, freshness, performance and cost efficiency of the platform.
• Investigate and resolve hard performance and reliability problems.
• Work with product, analytics and investigations teams to turn their needs into platform designs.
• Help set technical direction through architecture, design and code reviews, and mentor engineers.

Required profile

• 5+ years building and operating production data systems, including ETL and ELT pipelines; at least two years owning systems other engineers depend on.
• Expert Python and strong SQL, with typed, tested code, asyncio and concurrency.
• Go for backend services, and ClickHouse in production (MergeTree, materialised views, bulk loads, query tuning).
• Databricks in production (PySpark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog) with an eye on compute cost.
• Hands-on experience with pipelines over billions of rows and tens of terabytes, understanding partitioning, clustering and file sizing.
• Kafka, Airflow and Kubernetes in production; Docker and Helm; Google Cloud preferred, AWS acceptable.
• Operations mindset: instrumentation, runbooks, post-incident reviews, design documents.

Nice to have

• Blockchain data models (EVM, UTXO, non-EVM) and JSON-RPC or gRPC data extraction.
• Graph or distributed key-value stores for entity resolution or clustering.
• Infrastructure as code, GitOps and observability (Terraform, ArgoCD, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
• AI-assisted development, fintech, compliance or AML experience.

What we offer

• Health insurance, flexible time off and learning and development initiatives.
• Industry-leading compensation and generous equity.
• Team-building sessions and support for work-life balance.