Backend Engineer (Data Products) - Hybrid Software/Data Systems

Dune's mission is to make onchain finance observable. We're the industry standard for onchain data, trusted by institutions, protocols, and analysts to understand the onchain world and frontiers of finance. We deliver structured datasets spanning stablecoins, tokens, lending, trading, and payments from 130+ chains, serving 1,000+ industry leaders including Visa, WisdomTree, FINRA, IMF, Bloomberg, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Forbes, and the Financial Times.

We're a team of ~50, working across Europe and eastern US timezones. Our focus is on building open, verifiable data for ecosystems like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

About the Role

Data Products builds and owns datasets end-to-end: from raw chain data through decoding to 3,000+ models and 4 petabytes of curated data shared directly with customers and replicated into their warehouses.

The role focuses on the lifecycle of high-quality data, including orchestrating thousands of interdependent models, propagating schema changes without breaking downstream consumers, and handling corrections. This is a software architecture problem in a data domain. The role is a hybrid: a backend engineer who thinks in systems and contracts, working on data.

You will be the engineer we hand ambiguous product requirements to, and you will come back with a design, a sequence, and work the team can pick up, while building the hardest parts yourself.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build the control plane for our curated data lifecycle, including dependency-aware orchestration, backfills, restatements, retries, partial failure, and recovery.

• Decide, dataset by dataset, whether the answer is a model, a service, or a job, and own that architecture through production.

• Design contracts between ingestion and curation so a dataset can be reasoned about end-to-end.

• Build alerting and data quality signals that catch real problems and stay quiet otherwise, ensuring on-call is about incidents rather than noise.

• Work across Go, Kotlin, Rust, Python, and SQL, choosing the right tool rather than the familiar one.

• Break large problems into work other engineers can own, and sequence it so we ship something useful early.

Ideal Candidate

• You are a backend engineer who has gone deep on data systems, or a data engineer who has become a strong software engineer. You ship production services, not only pipelines.

• You have built or materially extended orchestration and scheduling systems, and can explain precisely what breaks at scale and why.

• You have handled schema evolution and data correctness in a system with real consumers downstream, where a breaking change has a cost.

• You have built or operated stateful stream processing in production (Flink, Kafka Streams, Spark Structured Streaming, RisingWave, Materialize, Feldera).

• You have strong SQL and modeling skills on large datasets, and an interest in how the query engine executes your work.

• You have solid computer science fundamentals and distributed systems understanding.

• You debug independently and drive root cause analysis to a fix that holds.

• You use AI tools effectively, understanding their failure modes and disliking AI-slop.

• You communicate clearly in writing and get the best out of a distributed team.

Nice-to-Have

• Deep experience with a transformation framework such as dbt or SQLMesh, specifically having hit its limits and built beyond them.

• Experience with data lake formats such as Parquet, Iceberg, or DeltaLog.

• Experience at a company where the data is the product.

Perks & Benefits

• A competitive salary and equity package, both ranked in the top 25% of companies in the space.

• Employee equity scheme with world-class terms, including a heavily discounted strike price (~90%) and a 10-year exercise window.

• 5 weeks PTO + local public holidays, swappable to suit your needs.

• A fully remote-first approach with flexible working hours.

• Healthy mix of async and sync work to minimize meeting overload.

• Private medical insurance, dental, and vision coverage.

• Paid parental leave: 16 weeks for primary caregivers and 6 weeks for secondary caregivers, fully paid, plus a 2-week phased return at full pay.

• Quarterly offsites in exciting locations (e.g., Tuscany, Berlin, Austria, Athens).

• Yearly travel allowance for connecting and co-working with others.

• Allowance for at-home setup or local co-working space.