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Lead Data Engineer
Salary
Salary range shown is either directly from the job description or estimated based on typical salaries for similar roles in this industry. This estimate aims to give a general idea of the expected compensation for the position.
$185000 - $225000
Job Description
About Us:
Zora is a new kind of on-chain social network where you can express yourself freely, connect with others, and discover the value of your imagination. We believe that by using crypto, we can enable a more equitable system for creators, fundamentally rediscovering the power of the internet.
We’re working tirelessly to make Zora available to as many people as possible with a simple, fun, and rewarding consumer app. Our mission is to make creating on the internet free and valuable.
About The Role:
We're looking for a Lead Data Engineer to build the data infrastructure that powers our Trade Platform. As our onchain social network scales, robust data systems are critical to processing billions of trading events, calculating real-time earnings, optimizing liquidity, and surfacing the right trading opportunities to our users. You'll work at the intersection of blockchain data, high-volume trading systems, and consumer social products to build the data foundation that drives our creator economy.
This is a high-impact role where you'll own the end-to-end data architecture for trading, from analyzing blockchain events and user activity to serving real-time analytics to millions of users.
What You'll Do:
- Design and build scalable data pipelines to ingest, process, and transform blockchain data, trading events, user activity, and market signals at high volume and low latency
- Architect and maintain data infrastructure that powers real-time trading analytics, P&L calculations, leaderboards, market cap tracking, and liquidity monitoring across the platform
- Own ETL/ELT processes that transform raw onchain data from multiple blockchains into clean, reliable, and performant datasets used by product, engineering, analytics, and ML teams
- Build and optimize data models and schemas that support both operational systems (serving live trading data) and analytical use cases (understanding market dynamics and user behavior)
- Establish data quality frameworks including monitoring, alerting, testing, and validation to ensure pipeline reliability and data accuracy at scale
- Collaborate with backend engineers to design event schemas, data contracts, and APIs that enable real-time data flow between systems
- Partner with product and analytics teams to understand data needs and translate them into robust engineering solutions
- Provide technical leadership by mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, establishing best practices, and driving architectural decisions for the data platform
- Optimize performance and costs of data infrastructure as we scale to handle exponentially growing trading volumes
What We're Looking For:
Required:
- 7+ years of experience in data engineering, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership role
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL for building production data pipelines, complex data transformations and evolving data platforms, shared infrastructure, and internal tooling with engineering best practices.
- Strong experience in designing, building, and maintaining cloud-based data pipelines using orchestration tools such as Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Temporal, or similar.
- Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and modern data stack tools
- Deep understanding of data warehousing concepts and experience with platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or similar
- Strong software engineering fundamentals including testing, CI/CD, version control, and writing maintainable, documented code
- Track record of optimizing data systems for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency at scale
- Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams including product, engineering, and design
Highly Desirable:
- Familiarity with DeFi, trading platforms, or financial systems and understanding of concepts like liquidity, orderbooks, and market dynamics
- Experience working with blockchain data (e.g. event logs, on-chain indexing) and EVM-compatible chains (Ethereum, Base, etc.)
- Experience with dbt (macros, incremental models, canonical modeling, and schema management) for large-scale data systems.
- Experience with Dune Analytics for querying and visualizing blockchain data.
- Experience with streaming data and event-driven architectures using tools like Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, or similar
- Experience using tools to manage tasks and across teams such as Linear, Jira, Trello.
- Understanding of product analytics frameworks such as funnel analysis, feature flags, A/B experiments, and how they drive product development and data architecture.
- Knowledge of GraphQL APIs and how to build data systems that power them
- Background in marketplace or two-sided platform data engineering
- Passion for crypto, Web3, and the creator economy
What We Value:
- Ownership mentality: You take end-to-end responsibility for systems you build
- Pragmatism: You balance technical perfection with shipping quickly and iterating
- Curiosity: You dig deep to understand problems and explore creative solutions
- Clear communication: You can explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
- User empathy: You understand how data systems impact product experiences
- Team growth: You elevate others through mentorship and knowledge sharing
Here's the Pay Range:
At Zora, we carefully consider a variety of factors to determine compensation for each position, including the role, level, and work. The US base salary range for this position is:
- Pay Range: $185,000 - $225,000 base salary + equity + tokens
This reflects the compensation target for new hire salaries for the position across all US locations. Please note, the compensation details provided do not include benefits and perks that we offer.
We also rely on market indicators along with considering your work location, job related skills, experience and relevant education and training, to determine compensation that is fair and competitive for you. Zora will consider paying compensation near the higher of the range in exceptional circumstances, where candidates have the experience, credentials or expertise that would warrant such consideration. It is always our goal to hire exceptional talent and we would be happy to share more about compensation during the hiring process.
Zora is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against qualified applicants or employees on the basis of race, color, religion, gender identity, sex, sexual preference, sexual identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, military status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law, rule, or regulation.
Why Join Us?
US-based, full-time employees are eligible for the following:
- Remote-First Culture: Work from anywhere in the world!
- Competitive Compensation: Including salary, pre-IPO stock options, token compensation, and additional financial incentives
- Comprehensive Benefits: Robust healthcare options, including fully covered medical, dental, and vision for employees
- Retirement Contributions: Up to 4% employer match on your 401(k) contributions
- Health & Wellness: Free memberships to One Medical, Teladoc, and Health Advocate
- Unlimited Time Off: Flexible vacation policies, company holidays, and recharge weeks to prioritize wellness
- Home Office Reimbursement: To cover home office items, monthly home internet, and monthly cell phone (if applicable)
- Ease of Life Reimbursement: To cover everything from an Uber home in the rain, childcare, or meal delivery
- Career Development: Access to mentorship, training, and opportunities to grow your career
- Inclusive Environment: A culture dedicated to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging
Our Location:
Zora is remote-first and international. Our headquarters are the internet and we have employees all over the world. We’re currently in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Berlin, Lisbon, and Vancouver.
