DefiLlama Careers
Come build the future of France!

Open positions

None at the moment

TLDR

• Anon friendly
• Max autonomy and control over your work
• High impact
• No meetings, all comms are async

Culture

DefiLlama is built by shippoors. What we value the most is speed of execution, and we actively try to remove anything extraneous or not needed.

I believe that people work the best when they have full freedom and control over what they do, so people working at DefiLlama will usually have very loose objectives (like "build an nft dashboard" or "list new protocols and review PRs") and they will make all decisions around the product and run everything themselves.

More specifically, if you work at defillama you can expect:

• I will not tell you what to do. You have the control and have to drive the product.
• All communication is async. We just send messages and people reply when they can.
• There are no meetings, at all. There's no schedule or expectation for you to be online at any time.
• Everyone is remote (obvious since we are anon).
• There are no limits to what you can do, if you want to improve an unrelated part of defillama you just need to do it.

This creates an environment where I instantly extend a lot of trust to everyone (I just trust that they are actively working, I won't micro-manage to make sure you do X hours on Y days), and the following people thrive:

• You enjoy having full control over your work and the tools you use.
• You enjoy making a large impact
• You have strong initiative, if you identify something that could be improved you just go and improve it
• You want to stop wasting time on things like meetings and stuff that doesn't matter and instead prefer having full and un-interrupted control of your time
• You believe in what defillama is building
• Ready to take on any role that's needed (we don't have classic separations like dev, product owner... everyone does everything. I personally find this very enjoyable, there's nothing like talking to users directly and seeing how they use what you built, then implementing features they request in a few hours).

However it doesn't work for the following people:

• Interns and part-timers: I don't micro-manage nor i am constantly demanding things to get done, so what happens is that people constantly prioritize their other jobs over defillama (because they have deadlines while at defillama work is open-ended). For this reason we just don't hire anyone other than full-time employees.
• You want a structured work environment. Defillama is just not this, we have no sprints, tickets, managers or anybody telling you what to do or when to work.
• You have low intrinsic motivation: Most people at defillama work independently, so if you don't have a strong intrinsic motivation it's very likely you'll get demotivated and stop working.

Anon-friendly

Right now every single llama working on defillama is anonymous. I don't know their names, where they live nor their gender.

We believe that where you're from, credentials, gender and anything else shouldn't matter, the only thing that matters is your ability to do the job well. For this reason we welcome contributors that are completely anon, we just require an eth address to send salary to and that's it, no need to doxx to us or to anyone.

There's already been multiple instances where we rejected applications from FAANG engineers in favor of applications from complete anons that contributed much more to defillama.

Employee benefits

• Discord nitro
• Co-invest in any angel deals that 0xngmi gets
• Custom llama pfp made just for you

Impact

Personally, I hate that in some of my previous jobs nothing would have changed if I wasn't there, as someone else would have just replaced me and implemented what I did in my stead. So for me impact is very important and I try to set things up for it to happen:

• Team is extremely small, atm there's only 8 full time contributors
• People working at defillama make most product decisions themselves and have a lot of autonomy
• We have a large userbase by defi standards

Combined, I believe these create a space where individual contributions can have one of largest impacts in the space. For example, one day you might choose to implement a new metric at defillama (eg: TVL/FDV) and that might change how DeFi valuations are done or how people see protocols.

Compensation

DefiLlama has no revenue nor investors, currently costs are just paid through donations and self-funding.

Salaries at defillama are in the 50-80k/yr range in USD. On top of that we add a vested equity grant equal to one year of pay at a low valuation (as of now <50% the one of our closest competitor).

We regularly increase salaries based on performance or if more funding is made available.

Applying

Just send a Pull Request to one of our repositories. If you are looking for a task, the easiest is to go to https://github.com/DefiLlama/DefiLlama-Adapters/projects/2, find a protocol on the Requested column and build an adapter for it so we can integrate it. Afterwards, DM @0xngmi on twitter on discord saying that you are interested in working at defillama.

If you continue making contributions to defillama after that first PR, that heavily increases your chances of getting hired. The reason is that by doing that you prove that you are someone that can take the initiative and work independently, which we value a lot.

Why defillama is important

This is just some thoughts by me (0xngmi) on why I believe what we do is important and what drives me. I'm aware that this sounds like the classic mumbo-jumbo of startups, and at the end of the day we are building a website, not saving wildlife, so feel free to just completely ignore this section.

Throughout my life, I've been cut off from centralized services multiple times, and been denied banking services. When that happened I felt incredibly powerless, you just receive a message telling you something is blocked but don't know why that happened, what propmpted it and there's nobody you can complain to or any way to fix that. You just have no power to change anything, and that sucks.

Because of that, I believe that the self-sovereignty and ultimate control over your own money that Bitcoin and crypto offers is extremely important, and not just that, but defi is too since it provides access to financial services to everyone while making it impossible to rug you, unlike banks.

What's more, I believe that it's also extremely important for there to be transparent, neutral, and open source data providers for this new defi ecosystem:

• Open source: All data must be reproducible, our methodology must be fully auditable for all of our data, and people should be able to fork if they disagree with us. We open source absolutely everything, including all of our data, backend, frontend and bots. We are aware this removes our moat, but we believe that the transparency that comes with it is even more important.
• Listing is free and open to everyone: Since we grew to a certain size, users started using us as a discovery platform. Because of that, refusing to list a protocol or a chain impacts them negatively since less people will find them. I believe it's very important that we stay completely unopinionated and list everything, even if it's a scam.
• Give choice to users: We don't believe we should be all mighty and choose what is TVL and what isn't, so instead we classify tvl into sections and let users choose their own methodology.
• Extremely transparent: We try to have all conversations on public forums like github and discord, so everyone can follow and know why each decision was made.
• Neutral: We should just be as neutral as possible, removing any possible incentives that will change our behaviour against some groups (eg: adding ads and listing faster the protocols that pay us for ads)

We believe that when building data analytics for defi it's very important that we avoid maximalism and practices such as listing fees or coercive tactics. That's why we are building defillama.