Senior Backend/Infra Engineer (SF)

About Witness

Our core mission at Witness is to make digital ownership more accessible. Building out the infrastructure and developer abstractions to accelerate the adoption of our protocols and products is the core focus and problem at Witness.

The product and tools you build will be instrumental in not only scaling our internal capabilities, but also extending access to digital ownership for developers globally.

As an engineer at Witness, you'll play a critical role in building out our foundational infrastructure in a fast paced startup environment.

This will involve researching, designing, and implementing novel engineering solutions related to hybrid onchain / offchain systems.

You will ship a lot of code, with the potential to work on things like indexers, databases, smart contracts, cryptography, and APIs all operating at a global scale.

Our current technology stack spans the following tools and providers :

• Onchain : Solidity (deployed on Ethereum / EVM L2s) + Foundry
• Backend services : Typescript
• Frontend services : NextJS App Router + Tailwind + tRPC
• All backend & frontend services hosted on railway.app
• Database / PostgreSQL hosted on neon.tech

About The Role

For the Senior Backend / Infra Engineer role, we’re looking for the following experience and qualifications :

• Experience shipping production code in a language like Typescript, Rust, Python, Go, Solidity
• Excellent problem-solving skills and a strong sense of ownership
• Obsession with shipping code with a bias for self-reliance
• Past work experience spanning Web2 and Web3 systems
• Deep experience deploying, scaling, and monitoring production infrastructure such as web servers, APIs, databases
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Bash or Python
• Extensive experience with security best practices and common pitfalls
• PostgreSQL wizard

About You

• A solid understanding of engineering principles. You enjoy building and shipping quality, resilient, and dependable services.
• A sense of grit to dive into a problem and own the implementation of solutions.
• Possess excellent communication skills for effectively conveying your perspective, ideas, problems, and solutions.
• A strong sense of ownership and prioritization when navigating the ambiguity of an early-stage startup.
• A motivation for accelerating the adoption of digital ownership beyond the current limitations of public blockchains.

Things to Know

We are an early-stage startup; our team dynamics are different from companies of other sizes and stages.

We're a small team, with high ownership, who are not only passionate about what we do, but seek to be exceptional as well.

Currently, our team consists solely of our 2 co-founders, Sina and Joe. There's a lot of stuff going on, and a lot of ambiguity.

• We prioritize having a strong, in-person culture in San Francisco for our founding team. We are open to team members who operate remotely on a case-by-case basis.
• We do NOT expect you to work all the time, but you’ll have to be diligent and hold yourself accountable regarding the boundaries for your work day.

Depending on your location, you may need to be flexible to accommodate the schedules of other team members and clients.

We want teammates who own it. We strongly believe that empowering everyone on our team with ownership is a key to our growth and success.

We expect every team member to not only own decision making, but also own the success or failure that results from their decisions.

How We Hire

Here’s the entire process. Always feel free to ask us any questions as our interviews go both ways.

Talk with us about the role (30 minutes)

We want to understand who you are, what you want to work on, and what your aspirations are. This conversation will be open ended so we can learn more about you and you can learn more about us.

Work on a small project to discuss in the technical interview

Implement a small project that will be communicated to you after our first call

Interview structure (60 minutes) :

Pre-work (before your interview) : Complete your project (advised)

0-5m : Introduction

5-50m : Building and expanding your project

50-60m : Questions on Witness / etc

Review your project with our Team (30 minutes)

You’ll meet with our co-founders and go over your project

Offer and Details chat with our Co-founders

We will go over the process, role and hammer out details about your position, onboarding and any other items to nail down.