Blockchain.com Vice President, Engineering Lewis Tuff on the Best Way to Start Your Web3 Career
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Lewis Tuff is the vice president, engineering at Blockchain.com. Blockchain.com provides people worldwide with easy and safe access to cryptocurrency. They have users in more than 200 countries, recently surpassed $1.2 trillion in transactions on its platform, and are valued at $14 billion.
The complexities of building something simple
Simple product experiences take a lot of… product and engineering effort and investment to really pull… off effectively. We have a great team of engineers and product managers that are constantly thinking about the consumer and user experience and really understanding… the pain points for… customers…
[We] invest in localization. That’s a big kind of key driver for us… It is about hyper localization… going into the different regions, going into different countries, understanding from being on the ground how crypto can be an enabler and empower individuals, and what it is that they need from our products to be effective.
… It means you have to build and focus on building more platform architecture and services that can then be extended and reused and tailored to the specific markets, so instead of just building a monolithic application or system that assumes… how the products [are] going to be used… we’re actually breaking that apart… to be tailored to the specific user base that we’re targeting.
Blockchain.com is a worldwide company.
We are a global team. We have over 550 people now globally, and [a] majority of those are all remote-first and working remotely…
We do have engineering hubs around the world for colocation [and] collaboration and for working through those more nuanced product and engineering challenges. But generally, people are able to work remotely and freely.
What is the mission of Blockchain.com?
… Crypto assets and the ecosystem [are] not a speculative tool; it’s actually [a] utility on how [consumers] are able to manage [and] control their finances without being hyper-inflated away and without capital controls.
[Cryptocurrency] allows [consumers] to interact with the global market and get paid by companies abroad, offer their services, buy products internationally, which otherwise would be very difficult. So for me, that was eye-opening to see that happening in real-time and see how embedded… crypto assets already are in people’s day-to-day lives and seeing the utility and impact that it can have on improving their quality of life. That’s why I’m in this industry [and] why I’m at Blockchain.com, [I’m a] big believer in financial democratization.
Blockchain.com careers: How to get noticed during the interview process
… We’re looking for builders. We’re looking for people that love to dive deep into hard problems and… propose solutions, and then they won’t rest. They won’t stop until they’re able to solve that problem effectively, efficiently and transparently… that’s a common trait of everyone here.
[The] second one is research. You’d be surprised… people actually don’t do any research on companies when they interview for them, let alone the crypto industry.
Look: You need to have some level of understanding of why… you want to join.
[Finally,] I think the whole industry is built on community. I can’t kind of overstate that enough: You need to be willing to engage.
You need to want to have an opinion and have healthy, contentious conversations around building the best-in-class product experience.
You don’t need to have finance experience to work in crypto, fintech or Web3.
I think it’s actually great to come into the space not having your perception skewed by existing constraints and existing guardrails because I think a lot of things are being rethought from the ground up.
… We have engineers from all sorts of backgrounds and this goes back to the kind of key principles; we’re looking for builders.
… We really are searching for [the] best talent to build best-in-class products. I think over-indexing on finance is not the way to achieve that.
Blockchain.com salaries and compensation
We have a process to constantly refresh and… reindex our levels and salary bands. We’re now doing that on a quarterly basis because the market is shifting so fast. Traditionally, people do that on an annual basis… and clearly, that doesn’t work in an environment like right now.
… It’s more about making sure we’re competitive, full stop across all roles and all levels. We’re paying a fair market rate on both the cash portion and the equity portion.
… You [can] decide to take proportion or all of your salary in bitcoin… We make that available to the majority of our employees, and payroll handles that, so it will go through [the] normal tax process. You just get the net [salary] paid in the token rather than in your fiat or local currency.
