Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#1

Post by jurgenwerk » Fri, Dec 15, 2017, 11:15 AM UTC

Last couple of weeks the most popular cryptocurrency exchanges seem to be gasping for air. The incredible demand is causing the exchanges (Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, Bittrex,...) to be incredibly slow and unresponsive. Trade price updates are getting delayed. Withdrawals and deposits are sometimes barely working. Some of them report they're getting an average of 50k new users on a daily basis.

How are the development and support teams handling this constant stress? How to even work efficiently when everything is on fire at all times?

Re: Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#2

Post by throwaway55356 » Fri, Dec 15, 2017, 3:06 PM UTC

I interviewed at Gemini. My impression was of a business environment somewhere between a startup and a Wall Street boiler room. Glass walls and a beer tap. Lots of extra hours. They told me that there is some turnover and they had trouble finding competent candidates.

The engineer who conducted my principle technical interview seemed to be pleased to find himself in the position of quizzing somebody. "Let's start with some whiteboarding." I did not immediately pick up the marker, but asked him to describe the problem to me, and he looked surprised. There were trick questions, and sometimes the answer was to buy the most expensive equipment. "Wow, I have not heard about that device." He looked really smug when I said that.

The other people I met were pleasant.

At the end, their secretary came to my room and told me "You're done here". At lunch, I noticed a half-dozen missed calls from her saying that she had dismissed me too soon and I had been scheduled to interview with a fourth or fifth person. I did not bother to call back.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#3

Post by hulkisdumb » Fri, Dec 15, 2017, 3:42 PM UTC

I may be the least qualified person on here, my here's my guess. Imagine you're a normal developer, minding your own business .. even so you have dozens of problems that plague your world of programming ... overtime, no actual formalization of requirements, n-number of tradeoffs and the worst part your main product is a damn customized cms system, now all of a sudden this cms explodes and is in demand . Now all your problems are made 100 fold and your pretty little world has disappeared .... that is pretty much what I expect the average answer to be on here

Re: Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#4

Post by corporateguy5 » Fri, Dec 15, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

I actually don't think they have a ton of real talent

Re: Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#5

Post by richardknop » Sat, Dec 16, 2017, 1:28 PM UTC

Probably similar to a typical startup engineering job. Lots of these exchanges started with little funding or were originally hacked together in a basement. Then they grew very quickly and suddenly had budget to hire serious engineering teams.

I assume you’d deal with supporting lots of buggy legacy code, either fixing bugs or refactoring. You could also be working on a new green field code to replace the old platform. Or anything in between.

They also seem to have trouble scaling and keeping their servers running during peak times. Assume there’s a ton of dev ops work as well as optimisations and performance tuning / scaling related engineering going on.

Finally, since these exchanges keep peoples’ cryprocirrencies On hot and cold wallets they probably have a lot of engineering resources focused on security.

Re: Ask HN: What is it like to be a crypto exchange engineer these days?

#6

Post by djellybeans » Sat, Dec 16, 2017, 11:24 PM UTC

For me just starting to get into Ethereum Dapp programming and still being a lot of new concepts to me, working for an exchange seems more within my reach as it crosses into my experience as a web developer.

What I'm curious about these larger crypto exchanges is if any of them has tried to acquire talent from more traditional trading websites (eToro, etc.) Though it's still the wild west in comparison so they would need to offer some very good incentives.