Job Description
When we started out in late 2021 our thesis was simple - blockchain data, despite it being public and free, was difficult to understand, clunky to access and troublesome to maintain. Answering a simple question like “Who are the biggest Ethereum token holders over time?” requires an engineering team to run their own RPC nodes, ingest the full history of the blockchain, clean the data, transform the data and finally summon a wizard to cast a complex SQL query.
Why is it so hard? Blockchains have historically been optimized for Writes (getting data onto the blockchain) and less for Reads (getting data OUT of the blockchain). This is because optimization efforts were focused on increasing transaction throughput and building fault tolerant and scalable consensus algorithms. This neglect makes it hard to get data out efficiently and reliably at scale.
To quote Tim Roughgarden, Columbia Professor, “Blockchains are (virtual) computers, not databases.” They are Turing machines that support general computations, and anyone can write and deploy their own smart contract for their own use case. This nearly infinite number of use cases leads to the fragmentation of data schemas for different purposes. Standardizing these schemas requires deep domain expertise to turn esoteric technical outputs into clear information for specific concepts like tokens, NFTs, stablecoins and DEXs.
Allium tames the chaos by ingesting, sanitizing, and standardizing all this data. As of this post, the data we’ve archived across 40+ blockchains is in the petabytes and growing exponentially.
This is one of the rare times in history where indexing a giant public dataset is sorely needed by all - similar to what Bloomberg did for financial data and what Google organized for public webpage data. With this indexed data, we are fortunate to support trailblazers in this industry and play some role the industry’s most exciting trends:
We serve 2 groups of customers today with the same data but different platform. Analysts who need to answer data questions about the blockchain (think BI) and Engineers who need highly reliable data queryable in near realtime (think Application backends). Our customers include the biggest institutions Visa, Stripe, Grayscale and also the biggest crypto companies such as Phantom, Uniswap. Allium is one of the unique companies in the industry that bridge blockchain and non blockchain worlds.
We love engineers who love solving new problems every single day.
If any of those bore you, we have many many more problems we have to solve!
You will make mistakes, costly mistakes, but at Allium's expense. We have an internal leaderboard of the costliest infrastructure mistakes made, and we (try to) learn from them. We don't have fancy Michelin-starred meal budgets, but we have a huge infrastructure budget for one to get better at your craft. Why? We leverage every tool (no prereqs) out there because we meet our enterprise customers where they are at:
(if any of the names above sound like foreign Pokemon names, fret not, you can come here and catch them all, we are here to teach and make you successful.)
Medical, Dental, Vision, Life and AD&D insurance - US folks get 100% coverage for Gold plans, 80% for dependents
Note: The sun never sets on Allium - we hire from any geographical location as long as you are willing to overlap 2 hours overlap on NYC mornings Mon-Thurs from 10am-12pm ET. We have people based in New York, Seattle, Singapore and Australia
All applicants have to answer this pop quiz: "What is an Allium? What is your favorite Allium?". Bonus points for the right pronunciation.
Allium offers on-chain data infrastructure solutions, including managed blockchain databases and enriched data schemas. The platform supports over 40 blockchains and provides real-time alerting capabilities for various applications. Allium enables users to perform complex queries efficiently, enhancing data exploration and integration into existing workflows.
