Backend Developer

We are a small team building algorithms analyzing social media and the cryptocurrency space. We are trying to find ways to describe groups of people mathematically. Some groups with well defined structures are easy, such as a company, government or an army. Others are hard: such as a village, academia or an online community interested in bitcoin. We are interested in the latter.

We believe this project can open the doors to solving the fundamental problems in decentralized systems design.

These will be your tasks

As a backend developer you’ll be responsible for managing things like scheduling background tasks, building API routes for our clients, and collecting and storing data from other APIs for use in our algorithms, all the while logging and fixing errors along the way. If you like working with MVC’s transforming and moving data in creative and efficient ways, this if for you.

We are also constantly finding new scaling challenges as we collect more data and users and need to readjust deployment on our servers. We need to manage communication between services, backups, testing, as well as resource management such as memory.

Skills & Requirements

• Intermediate Python
• A history of using MVC’s like Django or Rails
• Basic MySQL
• Docker
• Be the type of person who is language independent and enjoys using new tech
• Git
• Basic crontab

Bonus

• AWS
• NGINX
• Kubernetes
• Github and its services

We're offering these benefits

• Work on hard & fundamental problems
• Equity options
• Work from home or office or a cafe (whatever you prefer!)
• Work visa sponsorship to Germany (if you wish to relocate)

How we work

We are mostly a distributed team of 5 and growing. Most of the team members are located in Europe.

• Choose your location: It would be ideal for you to work with the team in Berlin and we are happy to sponsor a German Work Visa for you. If it is not possible for you to work from Berlin we can also offer that you work remotely.
• Regular off-sites: At least every quarter we make a point for the team to meet in person and work together for a couple of days. We typically rent a big house where we live and work for several days.
• Communication: We use the following tools at work: Slack for instant messaging Asana for task management Standup Alice (Slack bot) for weekly stand-ups 1:1 calls on per need basis
• Working time: We currently do not track your hours worked (eg. Mon-Fri 9-5) however we do expect you deliver results on tasks. We do expect that you will be available on Slack in the afternoon, Central European Time (GMT+1).
• Office: Most of us currently work remotely from home, cafés etc. and you are welcome to do the same. If you work with us in Berlin you can join us in our coworking space to get more of an "office culture".

Culture of Critical Thinking

One of the biggest risks we face is that we can fool ourselves into believing that we got something to work when we in fact did not. This is because verifying accuracy of our algorithm’s outputs takes a long time and significant infrastructure. This means that an experiment that was not well-thought through enough can lead us to wasting months of work. We cannot afford that. For this reason, it is essential that we build a culture around critical thinking and closely follow the scientific method.

If you are not familiar with Critical Thinking & the Scientific Method, we encourage you to watch the following videos before having a chat with us:

Richard Feynman discussing the Scientific Method

Big no-no’s

• Calls to authority (“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and you’re just an intern, we’ll do it my way”; “world’s top experts agree that…”)
• Discrediting ideas based on their public perception (“If you think that you are a X, Y, Z”)

Please include your GitHub account or some kind of portfolio of works within your CV/resume.