Lead Backend Developer - Blockchain Analytics

About Hyperion

Hyperion is an ML-driven SaaS that classifies blockchain entities and assigns risk scores to those potentially involved in illicit activity. We deliver real-time insights for AML compliance, risk management, and financial investigations. We’re building scalable, transparent tooling to bring clarity to on-chain activity across major networks.

Role: Lead Backend Developer - Blockchain Analytics

Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates (on-site)

Reporting to: C-suite Management

What you’ll own

You’ll lead the design and delivery of our core data and serving platform: real-time blockchain consumers, robust ETL/orchestration, high-availability feature stores, and low-latency APIs that power model training and live inference. You’ll also provide technical leadership for a small team, drive the roadmap with product, and ensure our platform meets reliability, security, and compliance expectations for AML use cases.

Key Responsibilities

Technical & Architecture

• Design, build, and operate real-time blockchain data consumers (EVM + non-EVM where relevant), including mempool/blocks/logs, token transfers, internal txns, and traces.
• Architect a cross-network features encoder and high-availability feature store for training & inference (batch + streaming).
• Build ETL pipelines and orchestration into PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and appropriate NoSQL stores; manage schema evolution and backfills.
• Develop low-latency web APIs (ASGI/WSGI) for risk scoring, entity lookups, and investigator workflows; enforce SLAs.
• Integrate with JSON-RPC/WebSocket nodes, commercial data providers, and internal ML services.
• Establish observability (metrics, logs, traces), capacity planning, and SLOs; lead on-call for backend services.

Blockchain, Risk & Compliance

• Collaborate with Compliance/Analysts to encode risk signals (e.g., mixers, sanctioned entities, peel chains, bridges) into features and rules that complement ML.
• Ensure data lineage, auditability, and model output traceability required for AML review workflows.
• Guide network/node strategy (self-hosted vs provider), cost/reliability trade-offs, and chain coverage roadmap (L1/L2).

Leadership & Project Management

• Own the engineering roadmap, estimations, and sprint outcomes; unblock the team and drive cross-functional alignment.
• Lead technical design reviews, set coding standards, and conduct thorough code reviews.
• Mentor engineers; grow competencies in data engineering, performance tuning, and secure coding.
• Manage vendors (node providers, infra, data sources) and hold them to measurable SLAs.
• Communicate delivery risks early; run post-mortems with action items and follow-through.

Security, Reliability & Cost

• Champion security-by-design: secrets management (KMS), least-privilege IAM, network policies, input validation, dependency hygiene.
• Implement backup/restore, disaster recovery runbooks, and multi-AZ strategies; optimize infra spend without sacrificing reliability.

Minimum qualifications

• 7+ years backend engineering (Python preferred) with 4+ years building data/streaming or high-throughput backend systems.
• A must: prior work and extensive knowledge in blockchain and/or blockchain analytics, crypto exchange/wallet risk, or data providers; familiarity with chain heuristics and clustering.
• Expert in Python for APIs, data engineering, and service clients
• Experience with ASGI/WGSI frameworks.
• Hands-on with Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, and infra as code (Terraform or similar).
• Deep experience with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse or similar OLAP databases (table engines, partitioning, materialized views, ingestion performance); familiarity with a NoSQL store (e.g., Cassandra/Redis).
• Proven delivery of real-time systems (RPC/WebSockets, streaming, backpressure, resiliency patterns).
• Production observability (Prometheus/Grafana/ELK/OpenTelemetry) and performance profiling.
• Strong project management: roadmap ownership, estimation, risk management, and stakeholder communication.
• Leadership: mentoring, code review rigor, and driving standards across a small, high-impact team.
• Currently based in the United Arab Emirates, preferably in Dubai (or willing to relocate).

Preferred/bonus

• Node operations (Geth/Nethermind/Besu, Erigon; Solana/Move chains a plus), archive vs full node trade-offs.
• Experience with Kafka/Pulsar, Redis, S3/Parquet/Iceberg/Delta; vector DBs for entity/link search.
• Exposure to ML pipelines (feature stores, online/offline parity), and basic LLM tooling (OpenAI/HF) for analyst assistive features.
• Security certifications or hands-on incident response for backend services.
• Experience in financial crime/AML domains and familiarity with investigation workflows.

Employment Details

• Work Schedule: Monday to Friday, 8 hrs a day / 40 hrs a week
• Compensation: We offer a competitive salary aligned with experience and market benchmarks for senior technical roles in Dubai’s blockchain and AI sectors. A performance-based annual bonus computed from the annual salary is available, tied to individual and company objectives.
• Benefits: Health insurance (medical, dental), paid leave benefits, Dubai visa sponsorship