Meet the Team Turning Intelligence Into Real-world Impact

I lead the blockchain intelligence team at TRM Labs. Our team’s mission is simple to state, but hard to execute:

Build the intelligence layer that helps governments, financial institutions, and crypto businesses detect and respond to crypto‑facilitated crime so the financial system remains something society can trust.

What does this mean in practice? Our work helps an investigator trace funds to the real people behind a ransomware ring, sanctions evasion network, or scam that wiped out someone’s savings. In short, we’re building a safer world for billions of people.

Crypto is now deeply intertwined with geopolitics, national security, and everyday commerce. If you care about the rule of law, about victims getting justice, and about innovation not being hijacked by criminals, you care about blockchain intelligence.

Our team sits at the center of this problem. We turn global streams of blockchain activity into actionable intelligence so that TRM’s customers can spot risk, investigate it, and take real‑world action.

What we’re building (and what’s at stake)

TRM’s products — whether it’s investigations tooling, compliance monitoring, or supervisory analytics — are only as good as the intelligence underneath them.

Blockchain intelligence is that foundation.

At a high level, our work looks like this:

• See the whole crypto economy: We ingest and index activity across a broad set of blockchains and assets so our customers don’t have blind spots when funds move across chains and protocols.
• Attach meaning to raw transactions: A transaction on its own is just bytes. We work to understand who is behind it, what they’re doing, and how that behavior fits into the broader threat landscape.
• Turn intelligence into decisions: We build models and heuristics, and detect transaction patterns that flag risk in ways that are actually usable and actionable — not just interesting in a research notebook.

Under the hood, this means fusing:

• Large‑scale blockchain data engineering
• Open‑source intelligence and reporting from the real world
• Threat intelligence on everything from scams and fraud to nation‑state activity
• Graph learning and statistical modeling to surface patterns humans would struggle to see unaided

The stakes aren’t abstract. Our intelligence helps law enforcement and national security agencies follow the money, build cases, and disrupt criminal organizations; financial institutions adopt digital assets while staying within strict AML/CFT standards; and crypto businesses and fintechs demonstrate they take financial crime seriously and can operate safely at scale.

Every improvement we ship — better attribution, a new typology, a sharper signal — can be the difference between a case that stalls and a case that ends in asset recovery or prosecution. That’s the level of consequence we optimize for.

How our team operates

We’ve learned that you can’t solve the problems we’re addressing with a single monolithic “research team.” The threat landscape moves too fast, and the needs of our customers are too specific.

So we organize around two pillars:

1. Domain‑focused pods

These cross-functional pods go deep on concrete problem spaces — think sanctions evasion, illicit drugs, fraud, nation‑state activity, or other major categories of crypto‑enabled crime. Their job is to understand actors, infrastructure, and tactics in their area, and to translate that understanding into:

• High‑quality attribution and clustering and intelligence
• Typologies and signatures that can be operationalized in TRM’s products
• Intelligence products that help our customers and the broader ecosystem make sense of emerging threats

2. Enabling platform teams

Alongside pods, we have capabilities that build the rails, platforms, and tooling that make intelligence production scalable: data pipelines, intel operations, analyst and investigator tooling, analytics platforms, and more.

A few principles shape how we work:

• Outcome over activity: Internally, we care a lot about “proof points”: concrete operational outcomes that show our intelligence actually made a difference — helping identify seizable assets, informing policy actions, or quantifying risk in a way customers can act on.
• Tight loops with product and go‑to‑market: Our job is not to publish beautiful internal reports. It’s to make TRM’s platform meaningfully better and to enable and support our customers to drive high-impact outcomes.
• Collaboration with investigators and analysts: We work closely with TRM’s investigators, customer teams, and training programs to ensure what we build lines up with the realities of cases on the ground, not just neat theoretical models.

You won’t be handed a perfectly groomed backlog here. You will be handed problems that matter — and the mandate to design the right solution.

My leadership perspective

I joined TRM in 2019 as the founding scientist with a background in AI and machine learning, cryptography, and blockchain analysis.

Since then, my focus has been building out the blockchain intelligence capabilities that now power TRM’s platform — step by step, layer by layer. I think of blockchain intelligence as the strategic backbone of three things:

• Customer trust in our data and products
• Product differentiation in a crowded vendor space
• Partnerships with law enforcement, regulators, and financial institutions who depend on our accuracy and depth

In practice, a few things matter a lot to me as a leader:

• Customer obsession: **We start from the real‑world problems of the investigators, analysts, and regulators who rely on our work, and work backward from the outcomes they need — not from our org chart, models, or preferences.
• Rigor in thinking and craft: **We think from first principles, challenge our own assumptions, and care about the quality of what we ship.
• Ego‑low, ownership‑high: We set ego aside, but hold a very high bar for owning outcomes for the team, our partners, and TRM.

Why do I love working at TRM? Because it’s a place where my work actually changes the world.

Who thrives on the blockchain intelligence team (and who doesn’t)

People who thrive on this team tend to share a few traits:

• Intellectually curious by default: You want to understand how things actually work — on‑chain, in threat ecosystems, and inside our customers’ workflows. You ask the extra “why” and are willing to go read the paper, pull the data, or trace the flow yourself rather than accept a hand‑wave.
• Obsessed with impact, not activity: You measure your work by whether it changes a decision, an investigation, or a customer outcome — not by how sophisticated the analysis looked. You’re comfortable killing your own ideas when they’re not moving the needle.
• Nimble in how you work: You’re able to reframe problems quickly as new information comes in. You don’t get attached to the original plan; you get attached to solving the right problem for the moment we’re in.
• Run fast experiments on the riskiest assumptions: When faced with an ambiguous question, your instinct is to ask: “What’s the single riskiest assumption underneath this?” and design the smallest possible test to validate or break it. You prefer short learning loops — days and weeks, not quarters.

This team is probably not a fit if:

• You want extremely narrow, pre‑scoped tickets and a stable project surface area
• You optimize for elegant analysis over clear decisions and operational outcomes
• You’re uncomfortable changing direction when new evidence shows your initial thesis was wrong

Why TRM might be your next mission

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you could apply your skills in a lot of different industries.

The reason to choose this one is that you want your work to matter in a very specific way: you want to help shape how the world actually fights financial crime and safeguards the next generation of financial infrastructure.

On the blockchain intelligence team at TRM, you will:

• Work on problems that sit at the intersection of data, AI/ML, economics, and geopolitics
• See your work surface directly in tools used by government agencies, financial institutions, and crypto businesses around the world
• Collaborate with people who take the stakes seriously and are willing to think from first principles, rather than copy what’s been done before

If that sounds like the kind of problem space that energizes you, you’ll find peers here.

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If you’re interested in joining the blockchain intelligence team — or just want to explore the type of impact you could have on TRM’s mission — check out our open roles on our careers page.

Even if you don’t see a perfect fit but the work clearly resonates with you, apply anyway. We care more about bringing in the right people for this mission than about matching every bullet point on a job description.