Backend Engineer at Ntropy Network

We are a startup which requires you to put in a lot more work and soul than a regular job. We believe, however, that nothing easy is worth doing. We will expect a lot from you, and you should expect a lot from us.

The following is a big plus

• - fluency in Python and Rust
• - experience with multi-GPU environments
• - recognized open-source contributions
• - participation in competitive programming events (CTFs, Putnam, IOI, IMO, IPHO, Topcoder, Codeforces, etc.)
• - experience with infrastructure-as-code, cloud deployments, Kubernetes, containers

Description

Over the last few decades, technological innovation has relied on democratizing some of its key ingredients: knowledge (open publishing platforms), algorithms (code repositories) and computing (cloud providers). However, the last key component, data, largely remains trapped behind barriers of regulation, privacy, schema standards and competitive risk. Enabling scalable access to data will unlock enormous value for both individual developers and companies. This has only been made possible in the last few years, through advances in manifold learning algorithms and privacy-preserving computing. See our blog for more details.

One of the most valuable kinds of data today is in the financial sector. Financial data plays a key role across many industry verticals. However, it has notoriously been locked behind regulatory barriers and a lack of format standards. Our end product is an API that makes financial transactions accessible to both humans and machine-learning models, in a scalable and privacy-preserving way.

We

• - come from various fields - engineering, mathematics, physics and arts.
• - are allergic to over-engineering.
• - are anarchists at heart and like to hack around the status quo.
• love playing board and video games.
• - are radically honest and appreciate challenging one another, rather than giving out “pats on the back”. Yet, we can always rely on each other for support, feedback and results.
• - are willing to learn and adapt quickly to new situations and requirements. Languages, frameworks, libraries, compilers, etc. are just tools for a job. A new problem might need a new tool. If it doesn’t exist yet, we will build it.
• - have a sense of humor (well, we think we do).
• As an early member of our backend engineering team, you will help
• - push the limits of distributed computing and orchestrating large-scale machine learning pipelines.
• - build the team and drive the direction of the company.
• - shape our product and culture.
• - experience the direct impact of what you build on hundreds of millions of people’s financial lives.

What do typical backend engineer tasks look like?

- Developing our core system and API in both Python and Rust using technologies such as PostgreSQL, ScyllaDB, Redis and ML using industry standard tools (PyTorch, Nvidia Triton).

Working with highly distributed systems that move and process large quantities of data. Reviewing and changing the architecture of these systems to improve metrics such as throughput and latency.

Understanding customer problems and designing vertical solutions on top of our core systems.

- Profiling and improving our stack by operations such as - evaluating database queries, profiling code and re-writing parts of it, or moving python code to rust.

FAQ

• What if I recommend someone who ends up getting hired?
• We will give you 20k USD for the referral.
• Where is Ntropy located?
• We are fully remote, with a virtual base in New York, US.
• What time-zones do you work with?
• We hire anywhere in GMT-7 to GMT+1.
• Do you consider part-time work?
• Not at the moment. Full-time roles only.
• How are you funded?
• We are backed by some of the top fintech investors in the world. Have raised single-digit millions of dollars so far. Can share more details over the call.
• Do you already have a product and customers?
• Yes. We have been in production since 1st April 2021 and have been rapidly growing since.
• Do you plan to sell customer data?

Ntropy is on a mission to enable products without data barriers. We will never sell customer data and will always put privacy and customer benefit ahead of any auxiliary financial gains.

What is the interview process like?

1. Send us problems you have solved before and how. Please include as much detail as possible: code, algorithms, derivations, proofs, etc. We will then do a video call to kick things off and go through it (45 mins).

2. We will give you a take-home project related to whatever we are currently working on (3-4 hours). Alternatively, if you have a relevant project that you worked on previously that demonstrates your skills as an engineer, you are welcome to use that instead.

3. We will then do a deep-dive through the project over a call and discuss the implementation, improvements and bottlenecks.

Above all, we respect your time and commitment and will keep you up to speed on where we are at during the whole process.

What are your hiring plans?

We aim to be 40-50 people by the end of the year. Mostly engineering roles.

What is your current stack?

back-end - Python + Rust (where performance matters)

compute - AWS, GCP

ML - PyTorch, ONNX, Triton

infra - Redis (cache), RDS + S3 (storage), EKS + Lambda (auto-scaling), EC2 + GCP multi-GPU nodes (training)

Work / life balance?

We are a startup which requires you to put in a lot more work and soul than a regular job. We believe, however, that nothing easy is worth doing. We will expect a lot from you, and you should expect a lot from us.

What is the compensation?

$130k-180k • 0.15% - 0.2%