Why Etherealize?
Etherealize is building the rails to bring Wall Street into the 21st century. Today's financial infrastructure wastes billions in trapped capital and operational inefficiency, forcing institutions to maintain massive reserves, limiting market liquidity, and creating systemic risk that grows more dangerous as markets become increasingly global and interconnected. With $40M in funding from Electric Capital and Paradigm, we are bringing together the best minds from Ethereum and Wall Street to rebuild the infrastructure that underpins the financial system — faster, safer, fully on-chain.
We are looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to own how everything we build gets deployed, secured, observed and kept running. You will be joining a team dedicated to unlocking the true potential of on-chain finance, creating a world where traditional assets flow seamlessly through blockchain protocols. Etherealize has a series of products moving from beta to production with institutional clients, and we need the right person to make sure they run flawlessly.
Why This Role Exists
Until now, infrastructure and deployments for our web application have been handled by the engineering team alongside their product work. As we move from beta into production, with multiple client environments, contractual SLAs and SOC 2 on the horizon, that is no longer sustainable. At the same time, our blockchain infrastructure, including an Ethereum execution client instance we operate ourselves and a ZK proving pipeline running alongside it, is about to become a first-class production concern. This is not a backfill. You will be the first dedicated DevOps hire and the foremost infrastructure expert in the company. The basics are in place; you will reimagine our deployments, monitoring, alerting, runbooks and infrastructure security for production, and own them end to end.
What Will You Do?
You will sit across engineering, security and the protocol team, and will be expected to look at an architecture diagram and know how you want to deploy it and keep it running — we will be asking you what we should do, not the other way around.
- Infrastructure as Code: Own our AWS infrastructure in Terraform. Design modular, well-architected Terraform that scales cleanly across multiple client environments and maintain it with the attention to detail that production financial infrastructure demands; a single misconfigured variable or secret is a latent bug a client will find later.
- Web Application Operations: Take over deployment and management of our client-facing web application environments, including CI/CD, environment provisioning and regular contract and application upgrades.
- Blockchain Node Operations: Run and maintain Ethereum node software in production including Ethereum L1 nodes and Reth-based execution client instances where we are the sole operator of the state. Keep them in sync, snapshot and restore them, run read replicas, handle reorgs, and know what to watch for before it becomes a problem.
- ZK Proving Infrastructure: Operate the proving pipeline that runs alongside our execution client, including managing and monitoring a GPU cluster. You do not need to understand the cryptography; you do need to keep a heterogeneous, GPU-heavy workload healthy, scalable and observable.
- Site Reliability & Observability: Build the monitoring, dashboards and alerting we will need to demonstrate uptime against client SLAs for both conventional web metrics and chain-specific health (sync distance, block times, time since last block, proving throughput). Design and test backups, disaster recovery, multi-AZ and multi-region resilience, and traffic failover.
- DevSecOps & Secrets Management: Bring secrets management into the infrastructure-as-code pipeline (HashiCorp Vault or equivalent), including private key and signer key handling, and partner with our security lead on SOC 2 readiness, policy-as-code and infrastructure controls.
- Incident Response & Runbooks: Define how the company handles incidents in production: on-call, escalation, runbooks and post-mortems.
- Cross-team Partnership: Work closely with the protocol engineers who built our execution client customisations and proving pipeline to understand how the services fit together and iterate on how they are deployed and operated.
Who Are You?
You are a hands-on senior operator who wants a blank slate and the autonomy to build it right, and who is comfortable executing as a one- or two-person function rather than hiring a department.
Required
- 5+ years in DevOps, platform engineering or SRE roles, with at least 3 years writing and managing production-grade Terraform on AWS. You build modular, reusable Terraform, and if we handed you an environment whose state file had drifted badly out of sync and asked you to reconcile it without taking anything down, you would smile and say "that's easy."
- Front-line experience deploying and operating production infrastructure at serious companies, where uptime and data integrity had real business consequences.
- Strong SRE fundamentals: observability, alerting, backups and restores, disaster recovery, high availability across zones and regions.
- Secrets management in an infrastructure-as-code pipeline (HashiCorp Vault or equivalent), including signing keys held in a hardware or cryptographic boundary (e.g., cloud KMS, HSM, MPC, or Vault Transit) with rotation and access control.
- Genuine blockchain familiarity. You have worked with Ethereum or EVM infrastructure and understand what a node does, how it syncs and what can go wrong.
- Meticulous attention to detail, strong communication, and the raw problem-solving ability to get into genuinely hard, novel infrastructure problems.
Strongly Preferred
- Hands-on experience running Ethereum L1 or L2 node software in production (e.g. at a node provider, staking operator, L2 team or exchange): snapshots, restores, read replicas, reorg handling, sync monitoring.
- Experience operating a Reth instance or an L2 / rollup stack.
- Deeper HashiCorp ecosystem experience: Sentinel (policy as code), Boundary.
- SOC 2 or comparable compliance experience from the infrastructure side.
Nice to Have
- Operating ZK proving infrastructure or GPU clusters (monitoring, scaling, hardware health).
- Integrating with Web3 custodians and the key-management, network and data-centre security requirements that come with them.
- Kubernetes, and container-based deployment at scale.
What's In It For You?
- Front-row seat to Ethereum history: You will own the infrastructure of a company fundamentally changing how financial markets operate, in a flexible, fast-moving environment where your impact is immediately visible.
- Scope & autonomy: You will define how Etherealize does infrastructure, security operations and reliability from the ground up, and have the ear of engineering, security and leadership while you do it.
- Career rocket fuel: We are one of the most dynamic and exciting startups in Ethereum, with deep ties to the Ethereum Foundation and other foundational Ethereum institutions. You'll work directly with Zach Obront (CTO, secured $10B+ in on-chain assets, ZK & L2 systems), alongside co-founder Danny Ryan (led Ethereum's Merge) and a team from Coinbase, Bloomberg, Microsoft, and Kraken. After this role, the sky's the limit for your career.
Employment Details
- Location: Austin, TX preferred. Remote within the US considered for an exceptional candidate.
- Compensation: $185k – $235k base salary + equity. Candidate's final comp package based on prior experience, qualifications, job-related skills, and interview performance.
- Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision healthcare, 401(k), generous PTO, and more. See overview here.
- Start date: ASAP.