Senior Data Foundation Engineer

About the Role

Data Foundation owns how blockchain data enters Dune, how it is represented, and how it’s delivered externally. This role involves thinking about large distributed data systems, recognizing traditional scaling patterns, and addressing software lifecycle pitfalls. It is ideal for anyone passionate about these topics.

You will be the engineer we hand ambiguous product requirements to, and you will be comfortable coming back with a design, a sequence, and a set of tasks the team can pick up, as well as building the hardest parts yourself.

Key Responsibilities

• Turn product requirements into technical requirements: model the domain, define the interfaces and workflows, and navigate trade-offs.

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

• Drive high-impact architectural decisions across the data platform and own components end-to-end from design through production.

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

• Design for correctness and performance under real volume: large-scale ingestion, distributed processing, and data lake storage.

• Raise the bar on design reviews, testing, and how the team breaks work down.

• Mentor engineers by example in a fully distributed team.

Ideal Candidate Qualifications

• You are a strong generalist with real computer science fundamentals and can adapt quickly to new technologies and problem spaces.

• You reason from first principles: make assumptions explicit, identify constraints and invariants, and derive solutions rather than reaching for familiar patterns.

• You have designed and shipped distributed data systems, making their contracts, state transitions, invariants, and failure modes explicit. You know their fault models and scaling weaknesses.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity: you will talk to product, customers, and the team, then commit to a scope and defend it.

• You use AI tools effectively, understand their failure modes, and dislike AI-generated sloppiness.

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

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with data lakes and formats such as Parquet, Iceberg, or Delta Lake.

• 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 of paid time off (PTO) plus local public holidays.

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

• Healthy work-life balance with minimal meeting overload, focusing on async work.

• 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 for team bonding and collaboration.

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

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

• Opportunity to work with top-tier talent.

• Access to exclusive Dune swag.