Data Engineering Lead

The Opportunity

As a Data Engineering Lead at Nascent, you’ll take ownership of designing and building the core data infrastructure that underpins our multi-asset, multi-strategy trading and investment platform. You’ll drive the development of real-time data pipelines, core transaction and position processing engines, and intuitive tools to support portfolio management, risk, and research. From designing systems that handle high-throughput, high-fidelity data to implementing tools that surface insights in milliseconds, your work will be instrumental in enabling fast, intelligent decision-making across the firm.

You will thrive in this role if you are a strategic thinker with a proven track record in building 0->1 systems, particularly in highly nuanced environments requiring numerical diligence. You have a passion for working with large datasets and a desire to leverage data to drive business insights and support decision-making. If you’re self-driven, obsessed with making sense of complex datasets and driving organizational change, and love high-agency roles, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput data pipelines and infrastructure to support real-time trading, risk, and research workflows
• Leverage AI agents as a first-class part of our dev lifecycle while building the guardrails, workflows, and instrumentation to support them at scale—without compromising engineering standards, legibility, or consistency
• Collaborate closely with portfolio managers, engineers, and researchers to surface actionable insights from complex, high-volume datasets
• Build internal tools and interfaces that make quantitative data intuitive, explorable, and decision-ready
• Establish data quality and anomaly detection systems to ensure integrity and reliability at scale
• Lead the technical strategy for data infrastructure, including tool selection, system architecture, and long-term roadmap
• Champion engineering best practices around code quality, observability, and performance optimization
• Own projects end-to-end—from ideation and prototyping to deployment and maintenance—within a fast-moving, autonomous environment

About you

• You thrive in less structured environments and are at your best when driving and delivering results with the freedom to build and execute your own plan
• You are as excited by starting a project as completing, maintaining, and continually optimizing it
• You find the plethora of opportunities to leverage data to drive value for the firm exciting versus overwhelming

Preferred Experience

• Experience developing complex software solutions such as rules engines, risk systems, or search engines
• Experience building user interfaces for efficient display of quantitative data, metrics, and analysis
• Exposure to a quantitative discipline or an industry where timestamps count – finance and crypto are great, but can also be AdTech or Gaming.
• Substantive experience building and maintaining high throughput data systems and detecting anomalous data
• Excellent Python and SQL skills, some experience with Rust or C++ will also be helpful
• Comfort in command-line Linux, Docker, and memory profiling/logs analysis
• Hands-on experience from beginning to end of a shipped working product (i.e., you’re an experienced builder)
• Proven experience working with a diverse set of technical and non-technical stakeholders

About Nascent…

Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We’ve made venture investments in 100+ early-stage teams that we believe have the potential to create substantive change, expand boundaries, and find new horizons. We are consistently on the hunt for the most competitive and curious minds exploring the edges of the crypto ecosystem and leverage our hyper flexible structure to accelerate ideas into fully deployed strategies.

Our Team & Culture

At Nascent, we are an interdisciplinary team of investors, builders & creators, capable of achieving more together than we can as individuals. We offer the opportunity to contribute to building the future global economic system with a world-class team and culture that pairs the freedom to explore, experiment & play with a competitive drive to win. We invest in our people by providing the autonomy to build, coupled with accountability & honest feedback to help learn, grow, perform & win. We’re a fully distributed team that understands the value of in-person time—we host two team retreats per year and encourage team members to come together for more frequent in-person work.

Principles that drive our team & work

• Compete to win
• Own your shit
• Explore, experiment, play
• Always be building
• Seek and speak truth

What We Offer

At Nascent, we offer a competitive total compensation package heavily weighted toward bonus, ensuring that when we perform at our best and the firm wins we all win.

• The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
• Remote and distributed working environment
• Comprehensive health benefits package including dental, vision, and life
• Generous paid parental leave & supported return to work
• Home Office, coworking space and wellness stipend
• Retirement plan matching contributions
• Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
• Access to our internal performance coaching, technical experts and support for continuing your skill development and growth
• Team activities and bi-annual in-person team retreats

We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity and differences of perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status, inclusive of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.