Finding an external job in BLOCKCHAIN/WEB3 (interview experience) | by Riti Nema | June 2023

This interview experience is of a developer working in a blockchain-based organization, Trading block with headquarters in London that offers external job opportunities globally . This article is intended for students who are interested in Open source, blockchain, web3 and to obtain remote-based opportunities. This article is articulated by Dhananjay Purohit, who has contributed in various open source projects and is currently working on Web3 trading networks and Bitcoin ecosystem. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhananjaypurohit/

This article will contain the following sections:

• About Commerce Block
• Early background that helped get this job
• How to apply (application process)
• Resources for finding open source blockchain communities
• Interview process

About Commerce Block

WEBSITE: https://www.commerceblock.com/

PRODUCT : Mercury Wallet -> https://mercurywallet.com/

CommerceBlock is an innovative London-based startup operating within the blockchain industry. Its primary goal is to decentralize finance by providing a public blockchain infrastructure.

CommerceBlock wants to take barter, trade finance and commerce and decentralize it. The team at CommerceBlock builds the financial tools required in commerce and finance on the public blockchain without the need for “third parties” such as banks.

Early background that helped get this job

He participated in open source Bitcoin-based competition, Summer Bitcoin 2022, where his proposal was selected and he did a project for Alby Wallet (. His project was based on implementing a middleware library to support microtransactions in bitcoin, before serving ad-free content or any paid APIs.(Link to library:- https://github.com/getAlby/lsat-middleware)

He previously participated in many open source competitions such as Google Summer of codes and actively contributed to open source projects of the Linux Foundation. His open source contribution practices helped him crack the Summer of Bitcoin as well.

How to apply (application process)

After completing the Alby Wallet project, he started reaching out to various bitcoin-based open source startups on Twitter with his application and projects. The European-based open source communities are generally less active on LinkedIn, so it is recommended to contact them on Twitter. He targeted Bitcoin based communities and started reaching out to them.

Resources for finding open source blockchain communities

Interview process

• Selection status : Selected ✔️
• Level difficult
• Technology: Blockchain, web3 and Bitcoin

Structure of the interview/Rounds
1. Leader round
2. Technical round 1
3. Technical round 2

Leader round

The first round was a leader round where he was asked questions related to Bitcoin, blockchain and other related things about the Bitcoin wallet. This round was to make sure whether the interviewer is really interested in the Bitcoin community or not. So, firstly, their motive was to check how much a person knows about the community he will be working in, and then proceed with the next rounds. So if you are applying make sure you have good knowledge about this domain.

Technical round 1

The round started with a discussion about the project he did with Alby, focusing on both custodial and non-custodial wallets. In addition, there was a brief discussion of cryptography. After that, he was assigned a take-home task that involved implementing a simple blockchain API. The task required creating endpoints for mining blocks, adding transactions to the mempool, adding transactions to a block, and transaction validation, among other functions. Although there was no strict time limit, he submitted their solution (code with proper documentation and tests) the next day.

Technical round 2

This round was easier than the previous one, it started with a discussion about open source projects he contributed to in the past. The conversation then shifted to version control (Git) and associated commands. Furthermore, he was asked to run the Mercury wallet in dev mode on his machine, following the instructions outlined in the project’s ReadMe. In real time, he actively addressed and fixed several minor errors that occurred during this process.

After these rounds he got a call regarding his selection in Commerce Block as full time SDE.

Special thanks to Dhananjay Purohit for sharing his experiences and resources to curate this article. Follow him on medium and feel free to ping me or Dhananjay Purohit if you have any questions.

Dhananjay Purohit on Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhananjaypurohit/

Riti Nema on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riti-nema-707b1719b/

Please follow if you found this article helpful and feel free to leave comments and suggestions.

Best wishes. Good luck with coding!!