Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

Ava Labs; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Ava Labs in New York is hiring a Staff Engineer for the Platform Engineering Group to maintain AvalancheGo and serve as the technical anchor for the node domain: consensus, P2P networking, state sync, VM interface, and EVM integration.

This hands-on architect-level role requires guiding the health of the codebase, setting technical direction across teams, and multiplying engineering impact. You will mentor engineers, drive upgrades, and evangelize the project within the org.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including staff/lead level.
• Expert-level Go with concurrency, profiling, and API design in large codebases.
• Significant open source experience with public reviews and RFCs.
• Proven production experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed systems.
• Strong testing discipline across unit to end-to-end testing.
• Experience with release engineering, semantic versioning, and migrations.

Responsibilities

• Own AvalancheGo maintenance and evolution; steward backwards compatibility for validators and node operators.
• Set and enforce engineering standards to define production quality.
• Design and advance core Avalanche network systems: consensus, P2P, state management, VM interface, and EVM integration.
• Champion reliability; establish observability standards and incident postmortems.
• Own the engineering lifecycle for network-critical code: versioning, upgrades, and test quality metrics.
• Mentor senior engineers; lead design reviews and broaden team capabilities.
• Drive protocol direction through ACPs and community proposals.

Skills

Go programming

Open source contributions

Distributed systems

Testing & CI/CD

Linux & containers

CS degree

GitHub Actions

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

GitHub Actions

Job description

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 The Role

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. We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Platform Engineering Group. This team is responsible for maintaining and advancing the Avalanche blockchain and its ecosystem.

Ava Labs is hiring a Staff Engineer into the Platform Engineering Group to serve as a full-time maintainer of AvalancheGo and the technical anchor for the node domain: consensus, peer-to-peer networking, state sync, the VM plugin interface, and the node's integration with the C-Chain EVM (coreth and libevm). This is a hands-on role that requires an Architect/Solver build, with tech lead responsibilities during coordinated network upgrades. You will own the health of the codebase, set the technical direction of the domain across the teams that build on it, and multiply the effectiveness of the engineers around you.

What You Will Do

• Own AvalancheGo as its maintainer: Maintain and advance the software powering the Avalanche network, as well as its environments. Manage contributions from both the team and the community in a fair, effective, and thoughtful manner. You hold the merge bar for network-critical code; assess contributions from the team and the community fairly and quickly, and steward backwards compatibility for the node operators and Avalanche L1 builders downstream of every release. Your review will be the last gate before code reaches every validator.
• Set and enforce engineering standards. Define what production quality means for the team.
• Design, build, and advance Avalanche’s critical systems. You’ll be contributing directly to the critical systems in the Avalanche network: consensus, networking (P2P), state management and sync, the VM interface, and performance of both the network nodes and their EVM integrations.
• Champion reliability and production readiness. Establish observability standards (structured logging, metrics, tracing, profiling), define SLOs for node performance, and lead incident review and postmortem culture for network incidents.
• Raise and define release quality. Own the engineering lifecycle for network-critical code: versioning and upgrade coordination, backward compatibility, staged rollouts across test networks, and hard test quality metrics (unit, property, fuzz, race-detection, and end-to-end network tests) before anything ships.
• Mentorship. Mentor senior engineers into larger scope, run design reviews that measurably change outcomes, and spread your context deliberately so the team can onboard, operate, and extend the node without you. Turn a team of individual contributors into a team with shared standards, shared context, and a high quality ceiling. Becoming a single point of failure is a failure mode of this role, and you will be expected to resist it.
• Evangelize the project within the org: Write ADRs, release notes, and technical communications; engage external contributors; and model what a great open source citizen looks like.
• Drive protocol direction through the ACP process. You originate and champion Avalanche Community Proposals, represent the node's constraints in protocol design conversations, and position AvalancheGo for upgrades before they activate on Fuji and Mainnet. Your bets play out over 6 to 18 months.

This Role Is Not for You If

• You want to write smart contracts or build dapps. This is node and protocol engineering, several layers down.
• You want a purely advisory position.
• You consider reviews, on-call, migrations, and documentation to be beneath the level. They remain part of the job, done visibly.
• You are uncomfortable working in public. Your code, your reviews, your design docs, and occasionally your mistakes will be visible to the entire ecosystem.

What You Will Bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a staff/lead level (or clearly performing at that scope), with a track record of raising team-wide engineering quality.
• Expert-level Go: deep fluency with the concurrency model (goroutines, channels, the race detector), profiling and performance tuning (pprof, benchmarks), module and dependency management, and idiomatic API design in large codebases.
• Significant open source experience - maintainer or sustained core contributor on a widely used project, with a public record of reviews, RFCs/design docs, and community engagement (a GitHub profile we can read is worth more than any bullet on a resume).
• Proven production experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed systems at scale: consensus or replication, P2P networking, state synchronization, or comparable high-availability systems.
• Strong testing discipline across the pyramid: unit, property-based/fuzz, integration, and end-to-end network testing, plus experience building CI that enforces it (GitHub Actions preferred).
• Experience with release engineering for software users self-host and cannot be force-upgraded: semantic versioning, backward compatibility, migration paths, and coordinated network upgrades.
• Working fluency with Linux-based infrastructure, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent).
• BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience.

(This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.)

WHY AVA LABS?

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, economics, finance, marketing, and law with offices in New York City and Miami. We're highly passionate about Web3 and redefining the way people build and use finance and decentralized applications of all kinds. The company received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Join us and be a pioneer in a new technology that will have implications across a range of verticals such as finance, gaming, investing, collectibles, among many others.

Ava Labs is committed to diversity in the workplace and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.