TRM Labs provides blockchain analytics and AI solutions to help law enforcement and national security agencies, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency businesses detect, investigate, and disrupt crypto-related fraud and financial crime. TRM’s blockchain intelligence and AI platforms include solutions to trace the source and destination of funds, identify illicit activity, build cases, and construct an operating picture of threats. TRM is trusted by leading agencies and businesses worldwide who rely on TRM to enable a safer, more secure world for all.
The Data Platform team collaborates with an experienced group of data scientists, engineers, and product managers to build highly available and scalable data infrastructure for TRM's products and services. As a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will be responsible for executing mission-critical systems and data services that analyze blockchain transaction activity at petabyte scale, and ultimately work to build a safer financial system for billions of people.
The impact you’ll have here:
Build highly reliable data services to integrate with dozens of blockchains.
Develop complex ETL pipelines that transform and process petabytes of structured and unstructured data in real-time.
Design and architect intricate data models for optimal storage and retrieval to support sub-second latency for querying blockchain data.
Oversee the deployment and monitoring of large database clusters with an unwavering focus on performance and high availability.
Collaborate across departments, partnering with data scientists, backend engineers, and product managers to design and implement novel data models that enhance TRM’s products.
What we’re looking for:
A Bachelor's degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science or a related field.
A proven track record, with 5+ years of hands-on experience in architecting distributed system architecture, guiding projects from initial ideation through to successful production deployment.
Exceptional programming skills in Python, as well as adeptness in SQL or SparkSQL.
Versatility that spans the entire spectrum of data engineering in one or more of the following areas:
In-depth experience with data stores such as Iceberg, Trino, BigQuery, and StarRocks, and Citus.
Proficiency in data pipeline and workflow orchestration tools like Airflow, DBT, etc.
Expertise in data processing technologies and streaming workflows including Spark, Kafka, and Flink.
Competence in deploying and monitoring infrastructure within public cloud platforms, utilizing tools such as Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, and Datadog.
Proven ability in loading, querying, and transforming extensive datasets.
About the Team:
The Data Platform team is the funnel between all of TRM's data world and product world. We care about all layers of stack including petabyte of data stores, pipelines, and processes.
We have quite a big scope as a the team with new and exciting projects every quarter. As a result, we collaborate across the board with most teams at TRM.
We believe in async communication and are also not afraid to jump on a quick huddle if that helps to move things faster. We are both scrappy when the situation demands and also process-oriented when we need to achieve our OKRs.
We are always looking for people who can elevate the quality our tech and our execution. If you enjoy a remote-first and async friendly environment to achieve efficacy and efficiency at petabyte scale, our team could be a great pick for you!
Team members are based in the US across almost all timezones! Our on-call tends to be in EST/PST shift, whatever suits you the best.
We do try to reserve some overlap in the day for meetings. Our north star - no IC spends more than 3-4 hours/week in meetings.
Learn about TRM Speed in this position:
Build scalable engines to optimize routine scaling and maintenance tasks like create self-serve automation for creating new pgbouncer, scaling disks, scaling/updating of clusters, etc.
Enable tasks to be faster next time and reducing dependency on a single person.
Identify ways to compress timelines using 80/20 principle. For instance, what does it take to be operational in a new environment? Identify the must have and nice to haves that are need to deploy our stack to be fully operation. Focus on must haves first to get us operational and then use future milestones to harden for customer readiness. We think in terms of weeks and not months.
Identify first version, a.k.a., "skateboards" for projects. For instance, build an observability dashboard within a week. Gather feedback from stakeholders after to identify more needs or bells and whistles to add to the dashboard.
About TRM's Engineering Levels:
Engineer: Responsible for helping to define project milestones and executing small decisions independently with the appropriate tradeoffs between simplicity, readability, and performance. Provides mentorship to junior engineers, and enhances operational excellence through tech debt reduction and knowledge sharing.
Senior Engineer: Successfully designs and documents system improvements and features for an OKR/project from the ground up. Consistently delivers efficient and reusable systems, optimizes team throughput with appropriate tradeoffs, mentors team members, and enhances cross-team collaboration through documentation and knowledge sharing.
Staff Engineer: Drives scoping and execution of one or more OKRs/projects that impact multiple teams. Partners with stakeholders to set the team vision and technical roadmaps for one or more products. Is a role model and mentor to the entire engineering organization. Ensures system health and quality with operational reviews, testing strategies, and monitoring rigor.
The following represents the expected range of compensation for this role:
Individual pay is determined by skills, qualifications, experience, and location. The compensation details listed in this posting reflect the US base salary only.
The estimated base salary range for this role is $190,000 - $220,000.
Additionally, this role may be eligible to participate in TRM’s equity plan.
Please note – we factor in the different costs for geographies outside the United States.
We are building a safer world. That promise shows up in how we work every day.
TRM runs fast. Really fast. We’re a high‑velocity, high‑ownership team that expects clarity, follow‑through, and impact. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and direct feedback. If something takes months elsewhere, it often ships here in days.
That pace isn’t for everyone. If you are optimizing primarily for consistent work-life balance, use the interview process to pressure-test fit. We want teammates who thrive here, not just survive here.
AI fluency is a baseline expectation at TRM.
We believe AI meaningfully changes how top performers operate. We expect every team member to use AI to accelerate and reimagine their craft, not just automate surface tasks.
At TRM, AI fluency means you are among the top 10 percent of operators in your function in how you apply AI to:
Accelerate repeatable workflows
Structure and solve problems
Improve output quality
Increase speed and leverage
You will be evaluated on applied AI fluency during the interview process.
We hire and grow against three leadership principles. They’re the standards for how we operate, treat each other, and make decisions.
TRM Labs