Blockchain Engineer (Solidity)

Groma is one part real-estate firm, one part tech-startup. Our mission is to build cities better. We have two arms to our business. One focuses on acquiring, renovating and developing buildings in the cities where we operate. And the other focuses on enabling people to own parts of their city as it grows and develops around them.

The first part of business is already scaling rapidly. Groma owns and operates 50+ buildings throughout the Greater Boston Area, on track to double that by year’s end. To accomplish that second part of our mission, we’re launching the world’s first real estate backed cryptocurrency later this year. We expect it to achieve a few key goals:

• Enable more people to own more real estate, whether you have $1 or $1,000,000.
• Increase participation in local development to guide better development decisions.
• Provide an independently-governed, anti-inflationary currency backed 1:1 by real estate, combining the best elements of cryptocurrencies with a stable, predictable asset.

And we need to do all this in a way that’s user-friendly, intuitive, compliant with all necessary regulations, and leverages existing, battle-tested standards and technology so it can scale up big.

These are some lofty goals, but we’ve got a good idea of how to get there and are looking for passionate, creative people to join our team and help us build great products, develop great properties, and scale our vision to the world.

About Our Culture

Groma is a startup which means we work hard and are constantly evolving to meet new and exciting challenges. A healthy work-life balance is important to our team, but this is likely not your standard 9 to 5. Groma is on a fast growth trajectory and we’re looking for team members ready to dig in and build something special together.

While we were working remotely during the worst of the pandemic, we have been investing heavily in renovating our office space in the middle of downtown Boston - right next to the Government Center. We’re building a strong workplace culture with the flexibility to work from home as needed, but we believe in the power of being together and the mental health benefits of having an “office space” and a “home space.”

We have an ever-evolving list of values and conventions that guide how we operate as a company, but here’s a high-level overview of how we think about doing what we do:

• We’re committed to building an inclusive, equitable, anti-discriminatory workplace that reflects the diversity of people and cultures that live, work and play in the communities we seek to serve.
• We approach our work with pragmatic idealism that enables us to focus on our desire to make the world a better place in ways big and small while also being open to intelligent compromises that accelerate us on our path to serve our broader societal goals.
• Our whole team believes strongly in a value we shorthand as Justice League, not Superman. The challenges we are trying to solve require effective teams, not individual heroes. (Note: Yes… we are aware that Superman has been a member of the Justice League for quite some time now, but the analogy here is an easy, yet powerful, one for people to grasp. We don’t need a hero, we need a collaborative team of heroes who each bring something unique to the table to help solve problems that any of us individually would find daunting.)

Every day will offer a new challenge because, honestly, we don’t know entirely what we’re doing - just what we’re trying to do. We’re going to build something special, have a great time doing it, and, in the process, create an environment and culture that treats ourselves and others with the ultimate in fairness and respect.

About the Position

We are looking for an experienced Blockchain Software Engineer to expand the capabilities of our Engineering Team and be a leading force in our efforts to build the next generation of asset-backed cryptocurrency and the ecosystem surrounding it.

We’re still a very small team and are looking for an Engineer with experience and passion about blockchain technology who is willing to take a leading role not only in development but also in the decision-making and design processes of our blockchain infrastructure and smart contracts.

We are currently working within the Ethereum ecosystem, so experience writing smart contracts in Solidity and deploying to the Ethereum mainnet is required. But we value experience with any other blockchain network and also encourage discussions about advantages and disadvantages of each alternative.

Despite the focus on blockchain and smart contracts, experience developing web applications and best practices in front-end architecture will be appreciated. Particularly, experience integrating with a blockchain network.

Given the nature of our business, we are looking for a candidate that is interested and willing to learn new technologies and adapt to shifting priorities. If you’re equally passionate about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and learning the latest technology trends in the company of a talented team, we are looking for you.

Job Functions

• Build core product features, from conceptualization and research to implementation and deployment 
• Design, implement, test, and deploy smart contracts that meet rigorous audit requirements
• Help with the integration of web applications to an underlying blockchain backend
• Participate in the creative design process of migrating traditional financial instruments and concepts to the blockchain
• Work with the broader team to try to understand the business end-to-end and engage with the full team in helping to shape our technology roadmap
• Support Groma’s internally and externally facing development efforts; including identifying and maintaining potential Open Source offerings
• Help guide the future direction of our real estate backed cryptocurrency platform and build out functionality to support the novel features we’re developing
• Mentor and guide future team members as we grow the Engineering Team

Job Benefits

• Competitive salary for the Boston Area
• 5% 401k Match
• Fully covered high-quality health, and dental insurance plans
• Unlimited PTO
• 13 Official Company Holidays
• 1 Floating Holiday: We recognize that there are lots of holidays that are meaningful to different people in different ways and we want to celebrate that by enabling team members to have the time/space to commemorate those days however is appropriate, and using it as an opportunity - if they’d like to - to share the meaning of that day with the broader team.
• Optional pet insurance for cats, dogs, lizards, frogs, and waterfowl

Experience

We’re going to break this section down into a few subcategories:

• Essentials: this experience is very likely required for you to succeed and thrive in this position
• Nice-to-Haves: this experience would be beneficial, but isn’t necessary to be successful in this position
• Bonus Points: this experience would make you stand out from other candidates due to its relevance to some potential engineering initiatives
• Dealbreakers: these are some of the things that we are pretty sure aren’t looking for; so if you fall into these categories, we might not be ready for you just yet

It’s okay if you don’t check off every box; our team is still very small, very new, and we aren’t even sure if we got these right - we’re just trying to help give you a picture of who we think we’re looking for.

Essentials

• At least 4 years of real-world, professional Software Engineering experience delivering production-ready code to end users in some industry
• At least 2 years of real-world, professional experience in the blockchain space
• Familiarity and experience with the Ethereum network and the Solidity programming language
• Knowledge of the standards for token contracts (ERC-20, ERC-721, etc.)
• Advanced knowledge of at least 1 modern programming language and some experience and familiarity with JavaScript
• Passionate about blockchain technology and its transformative potential
• Working in a git-based workflow on a team of engineers

Nice-to-Haves

• Familiarity with other blockchain networks and ecosystems
• Contributions to open source projects (particularly related to Ethereum or blockchain in general)
• Python coding experience
• Experience with cloud computing services providers (AWS, Google Cloud Platform, etc.)
• Consuming and creating APIs and managing access to endpoints

Bonus Points

• Prior startup experience
• Information Security
• Distributed system development
• Active participation in the Ethereum community

Dealbreakers

• Recent Graduates: We’d love to hire some of you in the future when we have the bandwidth to dedicate to helping you grow and succeed as part of our Engineering Team, but that’s just not where we’re at yet.
• Remote Workers: Groma HQ is in beautiful, heavily-vaccinated downtown Boston Massachusetts and that’s where we’d like to have all of our Engineers, too. We are primarily a work from the office startup. We like to collaborate in-person and believe in the importance of spontaneous interactions. Also our office is great. We own the whole building and have made it very much our space. We’ve got a gym, locker rooms, a gameroom, rooftop garden and all the normal stuff to make an office an effective and fun place to be. Of course sometimes people need to WFH or from the road, we get it, but the default setting is important to us so we want to be upfront about it. Still, if you think you would be a great fit but are currently only accepting remote opportunities, feel free to apply and talk with us. We are open to being flexible when there is a great cultural match.