Building The Future of Finance in India

By Barath Jawahar, Engineering Lead

Over a decade ago, I had the opportunity to interview with the co-founder of BitGo, Mike Belshe, outside the library at Carnegie Mellon. I had just completed my Masters degree and at that point, read only a few articles on Bitcoin. Mt. Gox had been hacked, and BitGo was in the initial stages of building a secure, trustless, multisignature wallet for bitcoin. Excited by the potential, I joined BitGo as a frontend engineer, focused on building compelling user interfaces.

Over the last decade, it has been quite the journey for the crypto industry, BitGo, and myself. BitGo has emerged as a leading provider of highly secure and scalable solutions for businesses venturing into the crypto space. Throughout this period, I played an integral part in launching multiple types of wallets, which are now being used by more than thousands of institutions! It has been an immensely gratifying experience to witness the widespread adoption of our work.

In April 2021, I moved back to India, drawn by the incredible talent here. My objective was to further expand the core crypto infrastructure, which I firmly believe will eventually serve as the foundation of global finance. 

BitGo’s mission is to deliver trust in digital assets. This has never been more important, given the high profile collapses of FTX, Luna, and Celsius (among others). Over the years, BitGo pioneered the first large-scale multisignature wallet, offered meaningful insurance for assets in custody, helped create WBTC, and is now creating market structure to enable individuals and institutions to securely trade assets with minimal counterparty risk.

We still have a long way to go as an industry, but BitGo is working to get us there quicker. To achieve our goal of rebuilding financial infrastructure, many things are required, but none are more important than building an exceptional team of highly passionate and motivated people. This was the driving factor behind BitGo starting an R&D hub in India.

In terms of providing services for the Indian market, BitGo has been the go-to solution for major crypto native companies such as the ones listed above (to name just a few). Building a crypto business in any geography isn’t easy, particularly in India, where there’s unclear regulation and challenges to accessing the traditional banking system. BitGo’s hot wallets and custodial services enable businesses not to worry about new asset support, security, and user controls, so they can instead concentrate on usage, customer experience, and revenue growth.

As an engineer at BitGo, you’ll be working on the latest advancements at the intersection of cryptography, security, and user experience. BitGo wallets account for a significant amount of bitcoin transactions in the world, and we’re at significant levels for other top currencies as well. We’re the only company that has a combination of multisignature and MPC wallets that support a mixture of use cases, enabling us to better focus on transaction fees, accountability, privacy, recoverability, and user experience. One can imagine the level of security, efficiency, uptime, and testing required to maintain components that do this across thousands of coins and tokens. This level of impact is one of the main reasons to join BitGo, and it is something that the India team is razor focused on.

Currently, BitGo India is going through a rapid growth phase. We’re hiring across all functional areas — from engineering, data science, customer success, and product. In our brief time of existence, we’ve contributed to significant product launches, such as Doge support, Polygon wallet, Bitcoin Ordinals support, and Go Network (to name a few). We’ve also launched a platform for crypto financing, trading, and token management. Joining BitGo India means getting the opportunity to work with talented people who have the same vision and belief in cryptocurrencies.

In talking to existing folks in our India entity, I want to highlight a few phrases and terms that were mentioned: “Best job I’ve had,” “User focused,” “Lots to learn,” and “Open.” These closely align with the company values that play a crucial role in BitGo’s decisions. Having an incredible company culture is vital and is exemplified by the responses we get from the team in India. While keeping our clients first, our focus for India is to create a stimulating environment where employees feel valued and can grow in their careers. Plus, BitGo offers competitive salaries, benefits, and many perks.

The reasons mentioned above are why I’ve been at BitGo for over 10 years. There’s never a dull moment in crypto and we have an incredible opportunity in India to build disruptive financial infrastructure for the world. If you feel motivated by our mission, check out our open positions. If you don’t see a good fit in any of the open roles, send me an email at barath@bitgo.com. 

We’re excited to work with like-minded and passionate people. Let’s stay in touch and hopefully work together in the future.

Thanks to Mike, Chen, Nuri, Priyanka, Ankit, Sindhu and the entire India team for making BitGo India possible.