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Ava Labs, a blockchain infrastructure company founded by Cornell computer scientists, is hiring a Staff Engineer for the Developer Infrastructure team within Platform Engineering. The Avalanche platform enables high-performance Web3 solutions, and Platform Engineering builds and operates the core network systems: consensus engines, the P-Chain, virtual machines, and interoperability systems.
In this role, you will make the teams building these systems faster and more confident in their releases. You will work across Platform Engineering to identify where development is slow, fragile, hard to reason about, or insufficiently automated, then build durable infrastructure, tooling, shared knowledge, and technical processes that enable better engineering outcomes. The work spans CI/CD, ephemeral environments, automated end-to-end testing, chaos and resilience testing, observability, performance infrastructure, and developer workflows. This is a hands-on role where you will be in the code, not adjacent to it.
Key responsibilities include: partnering with teams to understand their build, test, release, observe, and debug workflows; supporting and evolving the CI/CD pipeline (currently Bazel and GitHub Actions) into a fast and trustworthy signal of code quality; making ephemeral and long-running test environments easier to provision and inspect; evolving observability infrastructure to collect and compare data across environments; improving confidence in consensus, networking, and protocol systems through end-to-end testing, fuzzing, and chaos engineering; turning recurring pain points into tools and automation; and spreading context through design reviews, examples, and technical writing so teams can extend your work independently.
You are a self-starter with deep curiosity who is comfortable diving into unfamiliar code and treating it as the source of truth. You have strong engineering judgment and an instinct for when code, tests, or systems lack maintainability, observability, or reproducibility. You build cross-team agreement through working software and demonstrated judgment rather than process mandates. You care about reliability and are motivated by building infrastructure that helps other engineers ship with confidence. You find the boundaries between application and infrastructure, product code and developer tooling more fluid than people pretend. You listen carefully yet are willing to prototype ideas before they are fully proven. You can make a high bar feel practical and push for better engineering outcomes in a way that makes people want to work with you. You have operated at Staff scope before and can point to a workstream you created or transformed that other teams came to depend on.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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 and ability to diagnose and pragmatically relieve bottlenecks
- Working fluency with Linux, containers, and infrastructure-as-code
PREFERRED:
- 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
