Staff Engineer, Developer Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform.

🏢 About Ava Labs

We're hiring a Staff Engineer for the Developer Infrastructure team within Platform Engineering at Ava Labs. Platform Engineering builds and operates the core of the Avalanche network: consensus engines, the P-Chain, virtual machines, and the systems that let many virtual machines interoperate as one network.

🎯 The Role

Your job is to make the teams building those systems faster and more confident in what they ship. You will work across Platform Engineering to understand where development is slow, fragile, hard to reason about, or insufficiently automated, then build durable infrastructure, tooling, shared knowledge, and technical processes that make better engineering outcomes easier and more repeatable.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Partner with teams across Platform Engineering to understand how they build, test, release, observe, and debug, then identify what is worth fixing, and how.
• Support and evolve our CI/CD pipeline, currently built on Bazel and GitHub Actions, into a fast and trustworthy signal of code quality across unit tests, end-to-end tests, performance tests, and other release-critical checks.
• Make ephemeral and long-running test environments easier to provision, inspect, compare, and retire.
• Evolve observability infrastructure to collect useful data from diverse environments and compare coherently across runs, versions, and configurations to reveal regressions and highlight improvements.
• Improve confidence in the correctness and resilience of consensus, networking, and protocol-adjacent systems through end-to-end testing, fuzzing, chaos engineering, and failure-oriented test design.
• Turn recurring team pain points into tools, automation and documentation, and spread the context — through design reviews, examples, and technical writing — so teams extend what you build without routing through you.
• Do the unglamorous work visibly so others emulate you: debugging flaky tests, tightening release checks, improving documentation, reviewing tool adoption, and following through until a system is genuinely useful.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 7+ years writing production software, with strong ability in Go and/or Rust.
• Experience in large legacy codebases with multiple teams and shared ownership boundaries.
• Experience building or significantly improving developer infrastructure, CI/CD, test infrastructure, observability, release tooling, or comparable engineering productivity systems.
• Strong testing discipline, the ability to diagnose and pragmatically relieve bottlenecks.
• Working fluency with Linux, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

⭐ Desirable Experience

• GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD systems; Bazel or similar build systems.
• Distributed systems, blockchain infrastructure, consensus systems, P2P networking, or other high-reliability systems.
• Kubernetes or similar orchestration frameworks.
• Large-scale observability: tracing, profiling, metrics.
• Using data to drive performance optimization.
• Chaos engineering, fuzzing, property-based testing, and failure-injection systems.

🎁 Benefits

Compensation: $253,479 – $316,849 • Offers Token and Equity Package

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

If you've ever thought about joining an early stage Web3 company - this is it! We're a global, world-class team of experts in computer science,