Unit 410: How Our Engineering Team Works
By Drew Rothstein, President
Who / What is Unit 410?
Unit 410 is an engineering led firm that works with some of the largest token holders to help them secure and use their tokens.
We design, build, and operate specialized engineering tools, software, and infrastructure that secure and help our clients participate in bleeding-edge, high-conviction protocols.
For new protocol launches, we often engage with core teams early to provide deep engineering insights into features that will help our clients secure, scale, and operate their networks safely.
What does Unit 410 do?
Our team is made up of engineers—both Jr. and Sr.—that have built and led teams across the crypto space, most of whom have had experience building / operating crypto networks, scaling them, and securing them.
- We build engineering tools for clients to operate their networks safely. We selectively open source so others may follow suit, including:
- Horcrux for shamir splitting files.
- Key Encoder for (re)encoding keys and addresses to load into HSMs.
- Ed25519 Threshold Libs for a threshold tendermint validator.
- We prepare infrastructure for clients to run networks securely. Other projects we’ve open sourced include:
- Network Monitors for various networks.
- An alternative highly available Tendermint Validator.
- We develop back-end administrative tools so large holders can expertly manage their tokens across thousands of addresses.
How does Unit 410 operate?
We are engineering built, led, and driven. We operate in a lean manner, balancing many opportunities and aggressively prioritizing only the most important work for our clients. We plan–including via weekly and quarterly meetings and via small units–but do not not over plan; we limit planning time and focus on being flexible and adaptable to our fast-paced industry and evolving opportunities.
Structure
Our structure is flat and nimble. We do not have product managers, a sales team, or biz dev. We prefer to have our engineering team own such responsibilities. In addition to owning specific engineering challenges and implementations, engineers at Unit 410 lead the team and work directly with clients to design, scope, build, and test the entire lifecycle of the given project. While demanding and involved, our approach produces the best results in the shortest time along with high job / career satisfaction from this ownership mentality that is not available when splitting up responsibilities more discreetly or receiving a ticket from a manager to fix / build something. This also allows for much more holistic feedback and growth for engineers across projects and cycles.
Rewards
We reward engineers directly and annually–rather than multi-year equity grants that tie people to an entity. We provide regular feedback to each other and discuss challenging matters directly and openly. We seek folks aligned with our mission, without obligating them to stick around for the sake of being tied to some sort of compensation package.
Operation
We operate 100% remote, with some locations having centralized teams to enable in-person collaboration and operations. Due to the nature of offline operations, these centralized teams help our clients with highly sensitive engineering tasks in specialized facilities.
We plan regular offsites for the entire team. Such in-person time with teammates is absolutely critical to building trust and getting things done.
What is next for Unit 410?
Continue empowering clients with bleeding-edge projects and network opportunities. We are continuing to grow our engineering team to be able to support more projects and networks simultaneously while maintaining a healthy and restful work / life balance.
If you are interested in learning more about us, feel free to reach out to us: Security, Job Board.