Meeting the engineering challenge at Cense

David Garcia | Head of Engineering

“When we started building Cense, one of the biggest questions we faced was: how do you automate an established manual process and build trust?

If you’ve ever worked with crypto, you know how messy it can be. Every blockchain speaks its own language. Every exchange has its own API (and version of CSV file). Data comes in every possible format and most of it isn’t designed for use by banks’ compliance teams in the first place.

Now imagine you’re a bank or a fintech trying to onboard a customer who owns crypto. You need to prove where their assets come from, check for risk exposure, verify portfolio composition… and you have to do that across multiple blockchains and exchanges.

Most compliance teams still do this manually: via spreadsheets, screenshots and endless CSVs. It’s slow, it’s error-prone and it just doesn’t scale. Which means it slows down new business inflows at banks and frustrates crypto owners at the same time.

That’s the problem we decided to solve at Cense.”

The challenge: fragmentation

“In essence, compliance is about trust. And trust starts with good data. But crypto data isn’t like bank data. It’s fragmented, constantly changing and scattered across systems that weren’t built to talk to each other.

Our goal at Cense is to give financial institutions a clear, reliable view of what their customers hold, both on-chain and off-chain, without the pain of manual processing.

To do that, we had to rethink the problem completely. Instead of trying to automate a manual process, we designed a system that’s automated from its core.“

The solution: automation

“Under the hood, Cense runs on a unified data pipeline that brings together all the data needed from blockchain to exchanges.

Once the data is ingested, we normalise and enrich it. So that, no matter where the data comes from, it looks and behaves the same inside our system.

That’s where our intelligent asset classification engine comes in. It figures out what each token actually represents and what kind of operation was performed in order to clearly identify each transaction type.

The result? A quick, trustworthy view of a crypto holder’s portfolio that compliance teams can rely on and have confidence in.”

How we build

“Building automation for compliance isn’t like building a regular app. Accuracy isn’t just a nice-to-have – it’s the whole point of our work. If a system misclassifies a token, that’s not a bug. That’s a compliance failure and a potential risk.

Because data volumes can be huge, with millions of transactions and thousands of tokens to analyse, we design everything for scalability. When we add a big portfolio, the system just grows with it.

This kind of engineering requires a specific mindset: part systems design, part data science, part detective work. It’s the kind of problem where doing things right really matters, and that’s what makes it so rewarding.”

Why engineers love working at Cense

“Let’s face it, ‘compliance’ isn’t the first word that excites most engineers.

But when you realise you’re building the infrastructure that makes digital finance – the future of finance – trustworthy, it suddenly gets a lot more interesting.

At Cense, engineers don’t just write code, they solve open-ended problems that no one else has fully cracked yet. We deal with high-scale data, blockchain and real-world consequences. There’s no playbook for what we do. We’re writing it as we go, and our culture reflects that.

We give engineers autonomy, visibility and real ownership. If you’ve got an idea, you can test it. If you spot a better way to do something, you’re encouraged to build it. We move fast, but we care deeply about getting things right, because what we do matters in people’s lives.

On top of that, we have a particular focus on quality. We strive to deliver at speed, but nothing takes priority over our quality standards. We are determined to build the right product, but also to build it in the right way.”

The last word

“When people ask what makes Cense different, I tell them this:
We’re not just automating compliance, we’re engineering trust at scale.

Every line of code we write, every change we deploy, every integration we build, all contributes to a system that helps financial institutions to handle crypto with confidence.

If you’re an engineer who enjoys tough problems, real-world impact, and a team that values curiosity as much as skill, then this is a challenge worth taking on.”

Find out how to join us and see the difference you could make.