Lead Data Engineer

Zora is a new kind of on-chain social network focused on enabling creators through crypto. They are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to build scalable data infrastructure for their Trade Platform, ensuring robust systems for processing trading events and providing real-time analytics to users.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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