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Engineering candidate FAQ

What does Propine do as a business?

We provide digital securities services for our customers, where our customers are mostly financial institutions. Our vision is to become a digital investment bank built on the blockchain. There are 2 sides to our solution: wealth managment and investment banking. On the wealth management side, we have our custody solution, where we provide a secure wallet to hold the digital token assets for our customers. On the investment banking side, we provide asset servicing services, where we help our customers issue asset backed tokens to raise capital, manage their distribution of tokens to their investors, issue dividends or bonds and other activities, all on the blockchain.

Is Propine regulated?

Yes we are. Propine holds a Capital Markets Services license issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to specifically manage digital assets. You can take a look here. There are less than 5 companies in Singapore who has this license currently(2021), and very few companies with a license from an internationally recognised jurisdiction like Singapore.

How old is Propine?

We were founded in March 2018

Is Propine funded?

Yes we are backed by institutional venture capital funds. We have received multiple rounds of VC funding since our founding. Currently we are closing our Series A with well known venture capital funds in United States, Singapore, India and other countries.

Where is Propine located?

We are based in Singapore but our remote employees are based all over Asia currently.

Is this role fully remote?

Yes it is.

What is the scope of work?

You'll be involved in development and maintenance of our products. We do not have silos so you get to touch everything eventually.

What is the potential for growth?

You'll get a chance to go learn about real world security engineering, applied cryptography, the blockchain and understand the capital markets.

Real world security engineering

You will get to learn about real world security engineering. As we hold our customer's tokens, we are forced to build a secure solution right from the start. We also have an in-house cyber security team and we undergo regular security audits with penetration testing.

Therefore by working with us, you will learn not only how to build a solution, but a secure solution. That immediately differentiates yourself from the other developers in the market.

Applied cryptography

You will learn about applied cryptography with us. We make use of various applied cryptography techniques to secure our wallet solution. We also do our signing of transactions at the low level, not leveraging on libraries. Through your time with us you'll gain an understanding of the various elliptic curves, symmetric and asymmetric cryptography and even which is the right mode to use for AES. These knowledge will be immensely helpful as you architect solutions in the future.

Again that also differentiates yourself from the other developers in the market where most startups operate at the application layer.

Blockchain

You will learn about the blockchain technologies and how to apply them to solve real world problems in the finance domain. We are blockchain agnostic therefore you'll have a chance to work with different protocols as they emerge. Currently we have done work on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Corda and many others where we wrote smart contracts for it or ran blockchain nodes.

Blockchain technology is an emerging technology which will see widespread use in future. Getting real world working experience now in this field, positions yourself well for interesting opportunities in the future.

Domain knowledge

Propine is positioned in the intersection of 2 industries - Finance and Crypto. By working at Propine, you will gain the domain knowledge of both industries. It will position yourself to join financial institutions in future.

What technologies am I working with?

Our main stack is on Typescript and Ruby on Rails. We apply various ideas of applied cryptography at the core of the product. Our CI/CD are set up and runs on Azure pipelines with Terraform, Docker, AWS and IBM Cloud.

Would Propine provide a visa to work in Singapore, assuming Covid is over?

As we are transiting to a fully distributed company post covid, we will not apply for a Singapore work visa for you unless there is a strong reason to. However if you have a dependent pass or existing employment pass in Singapore, we will apply for a visa for you.

Is this role contract or permanent?

It is full time and permanent.

What is my job title?

We will give you a title appropriate for your level of experience.

What is the technical assessment like?

It is a take home assignment where you can spend up to 7 days to complete it. Y

What is the interview process like?

There are 3 rounds.

Round 1 is our technical assessment where there are 3 options. Option 1 where you can attempt a take home assignment which you can take up to 1 week to complete. Option 2 where you can attempt a time bound 2 hour assignment. Option 3 where you can send us some sample code for reviewing, however if we're not sure of your standard, we would ask you to attempt either Option 1 or 2.

Round 2 is a call with our CTO. Round 3 is a call with our CEO.

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