Data Engineer

About the company

Ostium Labs develops a decentralized perpetuals trading protocol that lets users trade global market assets directly from a self-custodial wallet.

About this role

Ostium is on a simple mission: make it possible for anyone with a digital wallet to trade stocks, commodities, currencies, and crypto with full transparency. No brokers, no freezes, no hidden spreads. We’re replacing the opaque, offshore brokerage model with a transparent, permissionless trading stack built onchain. Every trade, deposit, and withdrawal is verifiable through open, auditable code. We’ve raised $27.9M+ from General Catalyst, Jump, LocalGlobe, Susquehanna (SIG), GSR, Alliance DAO, Soma Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, Meltem Demirors, and others. ABOUT THE ROLE Ostium is looking for a senior-level data engineer to spearhead our ambitious efforts on the data side. We want to have ambitious goals for our data team; this person will be central to building Ostium's vision for data and executing it. This is an on-site position based in our New York office. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Maintain, improve, and optimize a new data pipeline to handle massive scale effectively. It’s “stock” right now; we need to optimize it for our unique needs. - Use 100% IaC to build, maintain, deploy, and manage applications and services. - Data Best Practices - Help engineers who are responsible for using the pipeline to understand how it works and how they can leverage it effectively. - Curate massive data sets, optimize data pipelines, and efficiently querying data. - Empowering the Team - Building tools to make ingesting new data a few hours work with AI. Then structuring the pipeline in a way where any person at this company can ask AI any question to understand whatever they need. WHO YOU ARE TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS: - Experience with data modeling tools (DBT, sqlmesh) and data orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect). - Experience with Postgres, Clickhouse, and other OLTP and OLAP data stores. - Deep understand of how data is stored, computed, and how to optimize queries. - Hands-on experience with Terraform, ArgoCD, GitHub Action, Docker, Prometheus, and Grafana. Evangelist of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). - Strong understanding of modern data pipelining and best practices. CHARACTERISTIC REQUIREMENTS: - Security Minded - Always looking to decrease security attack vectors. - AI Power Users - Not a vibe coder, someone who leverages AI effectively, validates outputs, and builds guardrails. - Solution-Orientented - Engineers will have requests and needs; it's our job to make sure they can move as fast as possible. - Prioritize And Act - Be a leader and take stock of what's needed, what will deliver the most value, and propose your own work and path forward. - Humble and Willing to Learn - Be willing to learn from quants, engineers, the ops team, and everyone at this company about everything. We have no room in this company for people stuck in their ways. - Winner - This is a team sport, and there is a very real scoreboard. We want people who don’t care about scoring the most points. They only care about the team winning and will do whatever it takes. - Disagree and Commit - Your voice will be heard, and so will all your proposals and plans. But once a decision has been made, whether you agree or not, we expect 100% effort in execution. WHERE WE WORK We have a global team, with our core offices in New York and Miami. If you're based in those city, we expect you'll generally be working from the office. We also hire remote employees when it makes sense, and in those cases, we expect you'll travel in for key product sprints so we can build together in person. We're intentionally building an in-person culture because the best collaboration happens face-to-face, especially during those sprints. That said, we build flexibility into the year: many team members work remotely while visiting family over the holidays. Ultimately, we're looking for people who value an in-person culture. Wherever you're based, we want teammates who enjoy collaborating face-to-face and are excited to spend regular time together in person. HOW WE WORK Our founding team includes Harvard and Bridgewater alumni, along with medalists in International Olympiads (Physics, Biology). We're here to win, which means shipping fast and staying obsessed with what our traders actually need. We work hard, not for optics, but because we care deeply about what we're building. We're a meritocracy, not a democracy. We debate hard, but once a call is made we disagree and commit, then row together. We also believe being AI-native is one of the only ways to scale properly. Our best operators and engineers know how to leverage AI without ever surrendering their judgment to it. Lead and hone your own intuition, but leverage the machine to scale your efforts. We know the cost of the old way firsthand. We started Ostium in a hacker house at Harvard after an offshore broker froze our accounts and kept our deposits. If you can't verify it, you don't own it. That conviction is now infrastructure. Building the neo-broker layer takes range: markets, pricing, risk, engineering, design, and operations. If that's you, there's no second best. MORE ABOUT US Global markets still run on infrastructure built decades ago: opaque brokers, black-box pricing, permissioned and geography-gated access. A new kind of trader — global, self-directed, cross-asset, stablecoin-native — has outgrown all of it, and that trader is who we're building for. Most of the industry is trying to rebuild liquidity onchain from scratch. We took a different view: the world's deepest markets already hold the liquidity traders want. What's broken is access. So we built the hard part — the legal, operational, and technical infrastructure to connect directly into those markets and route their liquidity onchain, to anyone with a wallet. Prime-broker-grade access in the hands of the individual trader, with every spread, liquidation, and dollar of collateral verifiable onchain. Perpetuals just went mainstream. US regulators have ope