Life at Trilitech | Ole Krüger, Staff Software Engineer

Meet Ole Krüger, a Staff Software Engineer at Trilitech. Ole joined us three years ago and brings his expertise and passion for problem-solving to the ever-evolving world of blockchain. 

Can you summarise your career before Trilitech?

I worked in finance for five years, specifically in derivatives pricing and trading as a Software Engineer. The challenges I faced were quite similar to the ones I encounter now, involving complex software engineering problems and finding innovative solutions.

Why Trilitech?

After five years in finance, the domain had exhausted my curiosity. I’d been monitoring blockchain as a space for a while and was always interested in its potential. The Tezos whitepaper resonated with me, especially the idea of on-chain governance, which is similar to the way I approach software engineering–always incremental and progressively improving things.

After I applied, I had a great chat with Arthur, the co-founder of Tezos, which cemented my interest. I ended up becoming the sixth engineer to join the team. 

What does your day-to-day as a Staff Software Engineer look like? 

Around 20% of my time is spent hands-on coding classic software engineering tasks. The rest involves high-level technical work, which is my main priority. I review code to maintain quality, focus on the architecture and design of technical solutions, and guide my team to answer questions that haven’t yet been resolved in order to align on how we will tackle problems.

A big part of my role is talking to people to figure out what to do and how it works–essentially asking and answering the what, how, and why. I also organise how we mentor and share knowledge, whether it’s about how to do things or how things work. Before diving into tasks, we spend time aligning on what we want to achieve and the best way to go about it. Interviewing candidates also takes up a significant portion of my time. 

How do you collaborate with teams in the Tezos ecosystem?

I primarily work with the Nomadic Labs team and Functori. Most of our communication happens asynchronously on Slack. If we need more bandwidth to collaborate effectively, we arrange virtual meetings or meet in person in London or Paris.

What project are you currently working on?

I’m working on the core Tezos X space, which is an umbrella term for several initiatives. A major focus is the Smart Rollup platform using RISC-V, the next generation of Smart Rollup virtual machine technology. This builds the basis for Tezos X, grounded in three pillars: interoperability, performance, and composability. 

How would you describe your first month at Trilitech? How is it different today?

Process-wise, there were some similarities to now. My onboarding included implementing something in the codebase which showcases its capabilities. That exercise now covers significantly more information to reflect how much the blockchain space has evolved.

Back then, smart rollups weren’t as big, but they’re now a major focus. Three years ago, you could learn everything about the blockchain in a month; today, it takes several months to get up to speed because there’s so much more to learn. Priorities have also shifted. Performance used to be the primary concern, but now latency, composability, and interoperability are equally important.

What’s your favourite thing about Trilitech?

Trilitech does an amazing job of facilitating collaboration. There are incentives to come into the office, which is a great space for teamwork. The operational set-up is strong, and I get to work with a bunch of smart people solving complex problems. 

I love that you can casually talk to someone in the kitchen or sit down for lunch and gain insights from different teams. Collaboration happens both purposefully and accidentally, and the set-up helps avoid siloing. Overall, it’s a fantastic culture filled with smart and fun people.

What’s been your highlight so far?

The current project I’m working on is a definite highlight because it’s constantly evolving. Seeing visible progress is incredibly rewarding–especially since we started from scratch, built something functional, and are now focused on optimising it for speed.

What tips do you have for engineers looking to break into the blockchain industry?

Blockchain is a new domain, and while it can seem daunting, don’t let that discourage you. The field covers many areas beyond strict Web3. My recommendation would be to read about the space, see what interests you, and dive in.

Blockchain is particularly fascinating if you’re into distributed systems, performance engineering, or consensus mechanisms. However, it is important to remember that it isn’t limited to these areas. It’s also worth keeping an eye on what’s happening and what blockchain professionals are working on.

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Interested in working on RISC-V? Check out our engineering openings.