Scale data systems that handle billions
At Koinly, we’re looking for a Tech Lead who’s at their best scaling high-volume systems, optimizing databases, and digging deep into performance bottlenecks while guiding a small senior team.
This role is hands-on ~80% of the time, with ~20% focused on leadership, technical direction, and mentoring. We’re looking for someone who loves optimizing high-volume systems, tuning databases, and guiding senior engineers without getting buried in management overhead.
Our backend is pure Ruby on Rails, built by engineers who care deeply about craft, speed, and impact. You’ll work directly with our founder (also a Ruby and Rails engineer) in a culture that values autonomy, deep work, and zero bureaucratic bloat.
Key details in sum
- Report to: Engineering Manager
- Squad: Core
- Location: Remote - preference for Europe-based candidates
- Salary: USD $100k-$120k per year
- Type: Full-time (contractor - B2B)
- Experience level: Senior (+7 years) with prior leadership experience
- Start date: ASAP
- Team size: 4-5 directs within a 10 person engineering team
- Main responsibilities: Lead and scale a high-performance Ruby + PostgreSQL backend, driving architecture, team excellence, and cross-functional collaboration to power a global crypto data platform.
Why this role exists
Koinly’s products are built on a complex technical foundation, making quality paramount as we scale. With an expanding roadmap and engineering team, this role provides strong technical leadership while staying deeply hands-on. The Tech Lead will shape key architectural decisions, mentor developers, and actively contribute to the codebase, driving best practices, technical excellence, and the delivery of robust, scalable solutions.
What you’ll do
- Support and empower your team of 5 senior engineers while staying ~80% hands-on.
- Own and evolve the architecture and performance of our Ruby + PostgreSQL backend, processing billions (and billions) of records daily.
- Design, build, and run large-scale, high-performance data platforms engineered for low latency and high availability.
- Profile, tune, and squeeze every millisecond from systems that handle billions (and billions) of records across 900+ integrations.
- Drive technical excellence by setting best practices, design patterns, and coding standards.
- Review and approve technical designs and pull requests.
- Lead and guide debates to help reach consensus; once a decision is made, clearly communicate it back.
- Collaborate across the project lifecycle: requirements, design, prototype, implementation, review, release, monitoring.
- Collaborate async with product, design, marketing, and leadership to move fast without the meetings.
- Contribute to the development and planning of our core roadmap.
- Help scale our platform used globally by crypto investors, traders, and tax professionals.
What you bring
- Proven experience building and maintaining data-intensive, large-scale, high-performance platforms.
- Track record of solving performance bottlenecks and working with structured data at scale.
- Strong expertise in Ruby/Ruby on Rails.
- Deep understanding of data engineering principles: data modeling, ETL pipelines, stream processing.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), and monitoring tools.
- Comfortable with 80% hands-on coding alongside leadership responsibilities.
- Happy in an async-first environment.
- Experience with high-volume systems, performance bottlenecks, and structured data.
- Comfortable leading without layers: influencing direction without managing people full-time.
- Happy working async with a globally distributed team.
Bonus points if you’ve:
- Tuned Postgres.
- Debugged deadlocks or handled race conditions at scale.
- Designed or scaled ingestion pipelines with messy external data.
- Worked in domains like fintech, taxtech, martech, or open banking.
- Knowledge of blockchain protocols, smart contracts, and DeFi.
If you love scaling high-volume systems, optimizing databases, and staying hands-on while leading, this role is for you. Apply now!
Due to the nature of our business and external requirements, we perform background checks on all potential team members, passing which is a prerequisite to join Koinly.
