Lead Engineer

W3 Global Sourcing•San Francisco, CA

7d•Remote

About The Position

We are representing an early-stage technology venture building AI-powered workflow, governance, and data infrastructure for a large-scale decentralized finance ecosystem. The company is creating advanced tools that help technical and operational teams manage complex knowledge systems, automate governance workflows, and support risk analysis through reliable data infrastructure. This is a confidential search for a senior, hands-on engineer who can operate across backend systems, data pipelines, AI agent infrastructure, and product foundations. This is an opportunity to join a high-impact technical team as a Lead Engineer, owning the architecture and delivery of core automation systems, data infrastructure, and AI-augmented tools for complex decision-making workflows. You will build backend services, integrations, data pipelines, and interfaces that help automate governance processes, improve traceability, and enable analysts and AI agents to work with structured, reliable information. The role is ideal for someone who enjoys 01 engineering, high-ambiguity environments, and end-to-end ownership.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building production backend or server-side systems.
Strong hands-on proficiency with TypeScript and Node.js.
Working proficiency in at least one of Python, Go, Rust, or Java.
Advanced SQL skills and strong relational data modeling experience, ideally with PostgreSQL.
Experience building data pipelines that integrate with third-party APIs.
Strong systems thinking and comfort working across backend services, data infrastructure, and product-facing tooling.
Experience shipping iteratively with tests, observability, monitoring, and clear rollback strategies.
Ability to lead technical work in a high-ambiguity startup environment.
Comfort operating remotely in a distributed team.
Strong written communication and ability to coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Notion, Supabase, or similar workflow/database tools.
Experience building automation or data infrastructure for complex technical platforms.
Exposure to blockchain, DeFi, governance systems, risk analytics, or financial infrastructure.
Experience with AI agent infrastructure, tool-use systems, provenance tracking, or guardrails.
Experience with large-tree interfaces, document diffing, knowledge graphs, spatial canvases, or advanced knowledge-work tools.
Familiarity with cryptographic proof systems, Merkle trees, commitment schemes, event sourcing, or permission systems.
Open-source contributions in TypeScript, Node.js, Python, Go, or Rust.
Prior 0-1 startup engineering experience.

Responsibilities

Build and own production-grade backend systems using TypeScript, Node.js, and supporting languages such as Python, Go, Rust, or Java.
Design automation workflows that connect structured documents, databases, third-party systems, and governance processes.
Build reliable importers, exporters, validation layers, change tracking, and hierarchical diffing systems.
Develop data pipelines that ingest blockchain, market, protocol, pricing, and third-party API data.
Design schemas for chain data, market data, and protocol state with strong data quality and historical accuracy.
Create data infrastructure that can be queried by AI agents for risk analysis and business intelligence.
Build monitoring, alerting, validation, observability, and rollback paths for production systems.
Develop foundations for advanced knowledge-work interfaces, including tree explorers, document review workflows, preview systems, and consistency checks.
Contribute to AI agent infrastructure, including tool definitions, execution environments, provenance tracking, and guardrails.
Help design systems for data integrity, provenance, permissions, and temporal querying.
Drive engineering milestones independently while communicating risks, tradeoffs, and progress clearly.