VP Protocol and Backend Engineer
You will design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, and secure blockchain products, systems and infrastructure related to blockchain participation and custody offerings. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and implement improvements in infrastructure, monitoring, system automation, and incident response. You will identify and implement solutions for your domain where process automation or tooling can significantly improve your ability to operate infrastructure. You will research emerging web3 trends, identify product opportunities, debug complex distributed blockchains and protocols, implement monitoring and observability practices, participate in on-call rotations, and develop automation scripts and tools for deployment, scaling, and recovery.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, and secure blockchain products, systems and infrastructure related to blockchain participation and custody offerings.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify and implement improvements in infrastructure, monitoring, system automation, and incident response.
- Identify and implement solutions where process automation or tooling can improve infrastructure operations.
- Develop forward-looking views of domain operations and communicate insights that inform leadership and organizational strategy.
- Research emerging trends in the web3 and blockchain space.
- Identify, scope, and build new product opportunities that may bring value to the business.
- Debug complex distributed blockchains and protocols to improve participation.
- Implement monitoring and observability tools and best practices to ensure infrastructure health, performance, and stability.
- Participate in and improve domain-specific on-call rotations to ensure service reliability and uptime.
- Develop and maintain automation scripts and tools for deployment, scaling, and recovery processes.
Requirements
- Software engineering or application development experience in modern programming languages such as .NET, Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java.
- Experience with blockchain infrastructure or strong blockchain domain knowledge, including proof-of-stake, web3, and RPC.
- Knowledge of custody key management, key generation, HSMs, and MPC technologies.
- Experience or awareness working with Chainlink systems, services, or ecosystem.
- Ability to script with Python, Perl, or Bash and identify processes suitable for automation.
- Deep familiarity with compute infrastructure, tooling, observability, debugging strategies, and research.
- Expertise troubleshooting complex application flows across multiple systems and resolving server, network, and application issues.
- Working knowledge of Linux systems, performance optimization, and command-line tooling.
- Expertise with AWS, Azure, GCP, and virtualization technologies such as VMware, KVM, or Docker.
- Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, or LogDNA.
- Knowledge of security best practices including encryption, access control, firewalls, and traffic filtering.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills for technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to identify root causes and deliver solutions.
- At least four years of software engineering experience is a bonus.
- Experience operating validator or RPC infrastructure is a bonus.
- Kubernetes, Terraform, on-chain activity, and backend services experience are bonuses.
Benefits
- Competitive base salary and discretionary bonus
- Competitive paid time off
- Company-paid health and protective benefits for employees and 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