Sr. Software Engineer
ABOUT PAXOS
Paxos is a financial technology company delivering pioneering blockchain solutions for global financial institutions. Its flagship service is BankchainTM, a next-generation blockchain settlement platform that is transforming post-trade across capital markets. Paxos’ management team is led by CEO and Co-Founder Charles Cascarilla and its board of directors includes former FDIC chair Sheila Bair, former Senator Bill Bradley, former chair of the Financial Accounting Standards Board Robert Herz, former chairman, president & CEO of Lotus Development Corporation Jim Manzi and former NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer.
We pride ourselves on a very high hiring bar which is why instead of a standard job description, we think of our roles first and foremost in terms of the outcomes they are meant to achieve. So we have developed what we call a ‘Success Profile’ for this role, which has two sections.We hope you will enjoy reading this as much as we enjoyed writing it.
- Outcomes: Outcomes are meaningful and measurable work products that have a significant impact on the team and the business over a defined timeframe.
- How to Achieve Outcomes: We also have a strong point of view on how someone in that role could succeed in achieving those outcomes and, eventually, at Paxos. So we have taken the Operating System of Paxos - our values - and made it relevant to this role.
Outcomes
- Produces a work output by taking a complex user story, breaking it down into sub-tasks, and completing the sub-tasks with relative ease - own design, coding, testing all the way through deployment of each of those sub-tasks.
- Identifies and proactively tackles technical debt before it grows into something that requires significant up-front work to resolve. A rule of thumb is to start looking into root cause of issues whenever there is noise. There is no smoke without fire.
- Strike the right balance between fixing the problem at hand and focusing on finding the root cause of problem. For example, if it’s a production issue the priority is to fix the immediate problem and collect all the data necessary for root cause analysis. In a non-production environment, the focus should be on finding the root cause and fixing it the right way to make sure the problem doesn’t occur again.
- Active involvement and mentorship of junior engineers doing code reviews resulting in up leveling the skill sets for the entire team
How to Achieve the Outcomes
Technical Acumen Required:
- A rock solid engineer who is master of at least one domain. This could be a functional domain like Securities or Precious Metals or a technical domain like Distributed Systems, Cryptography, Databases, AWS, etc.
- Able to understand and articulate the design and application of the architecture of the entire system
Accountability:
- Communicates effectively, consistently and in a timely fashion, across functions and is able to work well with the Product, UX and Solutions teams.
- Proactively identifies problems with requirements (lack of clarity, inconsistencies, technical limitations) for their own work and adjacent work, and communicate these issues early to help course-correct.
Take Initiative:
- Takes the initiative to identify and solve important problems even if they are in their domain or work area because of the ability to spot problems downstream and work with others to fix them before they become fires.
- Shows initiative beyond merely knocking tasks off a list. Identifies and suggests areas of future work for themselves and their teams.
Be a Force Multiplier:
- Able to work independently with very little oversight beyond high-level direction
- Participates extensively in code reviews, mentors others via code reviews and pairing, document thoroughly as well as frequently presenting at team meetings
Keep it Simple and Smart:
- Understands the tradeoffs needed in creating good software in their area, which is often times an entire product or platform feature
Respect Everyone:
- Able to communicate effectively across functions. The ability to get work done across teams goes beyond mere proactive status updates (although that is expected as well)
- Play a leadership role in making the right trade-offs with other teams even when doing so might mean more work for themselves, as long as that is the right thing to do.
Paxos is an equal opportunity employer. It does not discriminate on the basis of sex, age, color, race, religion, marital status, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical and mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, veteran status or any other basis protected by federal, state or local law.