About Us

At Elliptic we believe cryptocurrency will play a huge role in the future of value transfer, and we care deeply about helping to build this future. In order for cryptocurrency to flourish, it’s important to prevent criminal abuse of the technology. Elliptic is the global leader in detecting, preventing, and pursuing criminal activity in cryptocurrencies.

Our unique platform gives us an unparalleled understanding of cryptocurrency capital flows, using a combination of network science and machine learning to aggregate and interpret vast quantities of transaction data. We provide anti-money laundering (AML) compliance software and investigative services to the leading participants in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Customers rely on us to analyze more than $150bn of their transactions every month, and include cryptocurrency businesses, major financial institutions, and federal government agencies.

The company has offices in London, UK, New York, NY, and Arlington, VA. We are backed by Octopus Ventures, SignalFire, Paladin Capital, Santander InnoVentures, and Digital Currency Group.

What’s the role?

Elliptic is looking for an ambitious, passionate software engineer to build application logic that manages cryptocurrency wallets in an automated fashion, interacts with dark web services, and collects cryptocurrency-related data from the dark and clear web.

The role will be cross-disciplinary, ranging from using standard web browser automation tools such as Selenium to designing a robust analytics tool for data gathering and monitoring, to interacting with databases and cloud services such as the AWS infrastructure.

What you’ll do:

Overall you will collaborate with engineers and data scientists to develop a robust, semi-autonomous application that manages cryptocurrency wallets and an analytical system that will help us improve our decision-making.

• Immerse yourself in blockchain - how it works and the various services that use them
• Build robust software logic that generates cryptocurrency transactions, stores related data, and makes it available for internal consumption in production-ready environments
• Build analytics interfaces to explore the data recorded and support data-driven decisions
• Enhance tooling to enable a broad range of analytics and experiments
• Design and maintain data harvesting tools (e.g. dark-web scrapers)
• Help make architectural decisions (and implement them!)
• Research, prototype, and recommend new technologies and frameworks
• Help other developers - give advice, perform code reviews etc.

What is the work like? What are the challenges?

Elliptic’s products are at the cutting edge of blockchain analytics. That means we are often tackling difficult problems in uncharted waters. There are more ideas than we have time to work on, the upside being there is always work to do covering lots of different areas. There’s lots to discuss and fascinating work is the norm - working at Elliptic is never boring!

From a data developer point-of-view the biggest challenges are:

• Ensuring that data collection is automated and robust
• Making sure that the data that are gathered meet some basic quality requirements
• Balancing complexity of the system with flexibility and auditability
• Keeping track of downstream impacts of changes to the data platform
• Staying on top of the various blockchain developments, forks, etc. that could affect our systems

• 3+ years industry experience with Python (building and maintaining Python modules)
• Experience in building analytics tools
• Experience in interacting with REST APIs of third parties
• Experience in building web automation and web scraping tools (Selenium preferred)
• Familiarity with data pipelines and modeling for analytic scenarios (SQL or NoSQL)
• A fast learner with enthusiasm for learning new technologies and applying them appropriately (avoiding one-size-fits all solutions)
• Proficiency with Linux
• Rigor in engineering best-practices (documentation, code reviews, test automation)
• A passion for solving difficult problems
• Excellent attention to detail and understanding requirements beyond the written word
• Strong communication skills

Bonus points for:

• Genuine interest in data analytics and data science
• Reactive / async programming
• Hands-on use of workflow management frameworks (e.g. Airflow, Luigi, Apache NiFi)
• Familiarity with DevOps tools (e.g. Docker, Ansible, Hashicorp, Jenkins, etc.)
• Strong Computer Science fundamentals, including good working knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and concurrency.
• Appetite for discussions about economics, money, identity and privacy

• Share options
• Private health insurance
• Work pension scheme
• Shiny laptop and multiple monitors
• Budget for training materials, events, and conferences
• Quarterly full day offsites
• Annual company 3 day offsite
• Coffee and beer!