Elliptic is the worlds leading Blockchain intelligence company. We identify illicit activity on public blockchains, providing solutions to leading financial institutions and law enforcement agencies.

We offer a number of products and services that sit on top of a common analytics platform. They cover features like customizable risk scoring algorithms through to fully interactive graph visualisations. The products we make have an impact on thousands of people around the world and enable the legitimate use of cryptocurrencies. We think thats pretty cool!

What’s the role?

Elliptic is looking for an ambitious, passionate data professional to help expand our cutting-edge blockchain analysis platform.

Data engineering is a core enabler of Elliptic’s offerings. We leverage open source technologies but have also written our own high-performance in-memory data pipelines and analytics engine. With your help we can extend the breadth and depth of our data curation and analytics capabilities.

What you’ll do:

Overall you will collaborate with engineers and data scientists to develop high performance, flexible data pipelines, visualisations, and analytical systems.

• Immerse yourself in blockchain - how it works and the various services that use them
• Build robust systems to curate harvested data and combine it with public blockchains
• 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 engineering point-of-view the biggest challenges are:

• Ensuring a single source of truth and a robust ontology for recording facts about participants on the blockchain
• Balancing high-performance data processing with flexible querying 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

• 5+ years industry experience with Python, Java, or Scala - all three would be ideal!
• 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:

• Hands-on use of workflow management frameworks (e.g. Airflow, Luigi, Apache NiFi)
• Familiarity with DevOps tools (e.g. Docker, Ansible, Hashicorp, Jenkins, etc.)
• Experience with graph databases (e.g. Neo4j)
• Exposure to real-time analytics and big data technologies (e.g. Spark, GraphX, Hadoop, Akka, ELK, etc.)
• Strong CS fundamentals, including good working knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and concurrency.
• Appetite for discussions about economics, money, identity and privacy
• Interest in cryptocurrencies
• Knowledge of and liking for a functional programming approach

• 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!