VP, Protocol Engineer (Validators)

Who You Are:

The Blockchain Engineering Team is responsible for deploying, securing, and optimizing validator infrastructure across multiple blockchain networks. Specializing in launching and maintaining validators, we ensure high availability, security, and performance to support decentralized networks.

As part of this team, you will design, deploy, and manage validator nodes, enhance automation workflows, monitor network performance, and implement robust security measures. The team collaborates closely with blockchain protocols, foundations, staking providers, and infrastructure partners to ensure seamless validator operations.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, and secure infrastructure and systems related to our blockchain participation and custody offerings.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and implement improvements in infrastructure, monitoring, system automation, and incident response.
• Identify & implement solutions for your domain where process, automation or tooling can significantly improve our ability to operate our infrastructure.
• Develop a present and forward looking view into what’s happening in each part of your domain and how it applies to the business. Establish and communicate views that inform leadership and organizational strategy.
• Continuously research and stay up-to-date with emerging trends in the web3/blockchain space.
• Identify, scope and build on new product opportunities that may bring value to the business
• Debug complex distributed blockchains and protocols to improve our participation.
• Implement monitoring, observability tools and best practices to ensure the health, performance, and stability of our blockchain infrastructure.
• Participate in and make improvements to, domain specific on-call rotations to ensure the continued reliability and uptime of our services.
• Work through others, to develop and maintain automation scripts and tools to streamline deployment, scaling, and recovery processes.

What We’re Looking For:

• You are an experienced Protocol, DevOps or SRE Engineer with;

  • Prior software engineering or application development experience in modern programming language (.Net, Go, Rust, C/C++, etc.)
  • Ability to script in a high-level scripting language like Python, Perl or bash coupled with an ability to identify human processes that can be scripted and automated.
  • Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure or strong knowledge of the blockchain domain (proof-of-stake consensus, web3, rpc, etc)
  • Deep familiarity with compute-infrastructure systems, tooling, observability, debugging strategies along with research aptitude and a desire to never repeat the same problem twice.
  • Troubleshooting expertise of complex application flows which span multiple systems along with an ability to identify server, network, and application issues and apply measurable remediations.
  • Working knowledge of Linux systems, system performance optimization and command line tooling.
  • Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and virtualization technologies (VMWare, KVM, Docker or similar).
  • Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, LogDNA, etc.)
  • Conceptual knowledge of security best practices, including encryption, access control, and network security (firewalls, traffic filtering).
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills with an ability to distill information to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Strong problem solving skills and ability to identify problems, determine their root cause, and see them through to solution.

Bonus Points: 

• 4+ years of software engineering experience.
• Hands on experience operating Solana, Ethereum or similar validation infrastructure (or RPC).
• Experience with Kubernetes, or similar compute orchestration systems and a familiarity with container orchestration.
• Skill in defining infrastructure as code with Terraform or other infrastructure orchestration tooling.
• Experience participating in or reading/parsing on-chain activity.
• Ability to build backend services in addition to infrastructure.

What We Offer:

• Competitive base salary and discretionary bonus
• Competitive paid time off
• Company-paid health and protective benefits for employees and their eligible dependents
• Free virtual coaching sessions through Headspace
• Free daily snacks in-office
• Opportunities to learn about the Crypto industry
• Smart, entrepreneurial, and fun colleagues

*Benefits may vary depending on location.