Tech Lead, Staff Software Engineer, Data (US)

As a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead on the Data Product team at TRM Labs, you design and build mission-critical data services that analyze blockchain transaction activity at petabyte scale. You work with data scientists, engineers, and product managers to create highly scalable features that power TRM's intelligence platforms used by leading agencies worldwide to investigate and disrupt crime.

What you'll do

• Build highly scalable features that integrate with dozens of blockchains
• Design and architect intricate data models for optimal storage and retrieval to support sub-second latency for querying blockchain data
• Collaborate across departments with data scientists, backend engineers, and product managers to design and implement novel data models that enhance TRM's products
• Work closely with product managers, data scientists, and customer-facing teams to understand user needs and translate them into scalable data solutions
• Write clear design docs, proactively share tradeoffs, and build alignment across disciplines
• Drive scoping and execution of one or more OKRs/projects that impact multiple teams
• Partner with stakeholders to set the team vision and technical roadmaps
• Mentor engineers across the organization and ensure system health and quality through operational reviews, testing strategies, and monitoring rigor

What you bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 5+ years of hands-on experience architecting scalable API development and distributed system architecture, taking projects from initial ideation through successful production deployment
• Exceptional programming skills in Python, with adeptness in SQL or SparkSQL
• In-depth experience with data stores such as BigQuery and Postgres
• Proficiency in data pipeline and workflow orchestration tools like Airflow and DBT
• Expertise in data processing technologies and streaming workflows including Dataflow, Spark, Kafka, and Flink
• Competence in deploying and monitoring infrastructure within public cloud platforms, using tools such as Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Datadog
• Proven ability in loading, querying, and transforming extensive datasets
• Experience owning 0-1 systems by building pipelines, data platforms, or ML/BI workflows from scratch, not just maintaining legacy systems
• Skill at simplifying complexity and communicating technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• A cost-conscious approach to system design, prioritizing performance, scale, and efficiency
• Experience mentoring engineers or analysts
• AI fluency as a baseline expectation: ability to accelerate repeatable workflows, structure and solve problems, improve output quality, and increase speed and leverage using AI tools

Nice to have

• Experience with LLMs or AI-powered workflows, including prompt engineering, internal tooling, and semantic search

What we offer

• Base salary of $200,000-$250,000
• Eligibility to participate in TRM's equity plan

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. The company operates as a distributed-first organization with $220M in total funding backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others. TRM is headquartered in San Francisco with hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.