Staff Data Engineer - AI Platform

About the company

TRM Labs builds AI-powered blockchain intelligence tools that help governments and financial institutions detect and disrupt crypto-related crime.

About this role

BUILD A SAFER WORLD. TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM's platforms enable investigators to trace illicit activity, build cases, and construct operating pictures of threat networks. Leading agencies and businesses worldwide rely on TRM to make the world safer and more secure. TRM's government cloud environment gives public sector investigators the same real-time analytical power our commercial customers rely on, and this role keeps that environment fast, reliable, and compliant as it scales. You'll join the Data Platform Serving team, working on the StarRocks-backed serving layer that sits underneath government cloud investigations, alongside the engineer who currently owns this domain solo. This is a chance to build hands-on distributed systems experience in one of the most operationally demanding environments at TRM: a regulated, high-availability government cloud deployment. The impact you will have: - You will own performance tuning on the StarRocks serving layer, using AI-assisted query profiling (Claude, internal tooling) to find and fix slow query patterns before they become customer-facing incidents. - You will build and harden data pipelines feeding government cloud investigations, using AI code review workflows to ship reliable changes faster in a high-compliance environment where mistakes are costly. - You will reduce single-point-of-failure risk on GovCloud data infrastructure by becoming the second engineer who can independently operate and troubleshoot the serving layer, cutting incident response time when the primary owner is unavailable. - You will use AI-assisted debugging and log analysis to triage production issues in a regulated environment, turning multi-hour investigations into rapid root-cause fixes. What we’re looking for: - U.S. citizenship is required for this role due to government cloud data access requirements. - Hands-on experience operating distributed OLAP or serving-layer systems (StarRocks, Trino, ClickHouse, or similar), including query tuning and performance optimization at scale. - Experience owning data pipeline reliability and incident response, and comfort using AI tools (Claude, Cursor, or similar) to accelerate debugging, code review, and documentation. - Independent ownership mindset: you can pick up an unfamiliar piece of production infrastructure, use AI-assisted research and code exploration to ramp quickly, and take on-call responsibility with minimal oversight. About the Team: - The Data Platform Serving team owns the layer that turns TRM's data into fast, reliable answers for the teams and systems built on top of it. - We're distributed, not distant: the team communicates constantly across Slack and async docs, with a bias toward direct, evidence-based technical discussion. - Decisions are made close to the data: engineers who operate the systems make the calls on architecture and tradeoffs, with input from the broader Data Platform org. - We work closely with Forward Deployed Engineering and Product teams to keep the government cloud environment at parity with our commercial platform. Team Operating Rhythms: - Weekly team sync to review open incidents, in-flight infrastructure work, and upcoming compliance milestones. - Async daily updates in Slack on pipeline health, ongoing tickets, and blockers. - Sprint-based planning cycles with clear ownership assigned per workstream. - Retro after any production incident to capture learnings and adjust runbooks. Learn about TRM Speed in this position: - A production database migration broke search-attribute registration across two environments right before a critical audit deadline. The on-call engineer traced the root cause, shipped a fix, and had both environments passing smoke tests again within the same day. - With a compliance deadline days away, the team needed off-cluster backups for the government cloud database with zero prior tooling in place. An engineer designed and shipped the full backup and restore pipeline — three stacked PRs — in under two weeks. - Audit log retention needed to jump to meet a new compliance floor with no advance notice. The engineer used AI-assisted config generation to update retention policies across the environment and verify compliance the same week. LIFE AT TRM We are building a safer world. That promise shows up in how we work every day. TRM moves quickly. We are a high velocity, high ownership team that expects clarity, follow-through, and impact. People who thrive here are energized by hard problems, experimentation, and continuous feedback. If something takes months elsewhere, it will ship here in days. Our work sits at the intersection of AI, national security, and fighting crime. The problems are complex, the stakes are real, and the environment evolves quickly. The pace and intensity of the work reflect the importance of the mission. As a result, the way we operate requires a high level of ownership, adaptability, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. At TRM, you should expect: - Priorities and targets to change quickly as we experiment and iterate - Work that often requires operating with a high degree of ambiguity - A high level of personal ownership and accountability - Close collaboration across teams and functions - Frequent, high-touch communication - Creative problem solving and out-of-the-box thinking - A pace that rewards urgency, adaptability, and outcomes This environment is energizing for people who enjoy building, solving hard problems, and making progress in situations that are not always fully defined. It also requires comfort navigating ambiguity, adjusting course as new information emerges, and maintaining focus and positivity in a fast-moving and intense environment. We also recognize that this style of operating is not for everyone. If you are primarily optimizing fo