Staff Engineer - AvalancheGo Node & Protocol Core

Blockchain and Web3 Insights LLC; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Ava Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Platform Engineering Group to maintain AvalancheGo, guide node‑domain architecture, and lead upgrades. You will own health and direction of core systems, mentor peers, and champion reliability across the network.

You will design and implement production‑quality features, enforce coding standards, and engage with the open source community to drive protocol improvements and community proposals.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including staff/lead level.
• Expert-level Go with goroutines, channels, and race detector; profiling with pprof.
• Strong open source background with maintainer or core contributor exposure.
• Experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed systems (consensus, replication, P2P).
• Solid testing discipline: unit to end-to-end, CI pipelines.
• Release engineering: semantic versioning, backward compatibility, migrations.

Responsibilities

• Own AvalancheGo maintenance and evolution for the Avalanche network and node environments.
• Set and enforce engineering standards for production quality.
• Design, build, and advance core network and VM integration systems.
• Champion reliability, observability, SLOs, and postmortems for network incidents.
• Oversee release quality, upgrade coordination, and testing metrics.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews, and promote open source practices.
• Write ADRs, release notes, and engage external contributors; promote transparency.
• Drive protocol direction through ACP processes and community proposals.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

P2P networking

Open source

Testing discipline

Release engineering

Linux

Docker/Kubernetes

Observability

CI/CD

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

pprof

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.

What Makes You a Good Fit

• A self-starter with insatiable curiosity combined with being comfortable diving into someone else’s code to understand how it works. You treat the code as the source of truth and are able to discern nuances from there.

• Meticulous attention to detail and an appreciation for clean, maintainable code. You create software as much for the end user as for the love of the craft.

• You believe in growing a culture of excellence. As a Staff Engineer you will set the definition for development standards among your team, as well as cultivating the quality you want to see in the developers you work with.

• You understand what makes a great open source project great. Not just in terms of code quality, but in terms of its ecosystem, its community, and its contributors

• You have operated at Staff scope before, irrespective of whatever your title said. You can point to a workstream you created rather than inherited, one that other teams came to depend on, and to the case you built to get it funded.

• You influence without authority. You have driven technical direction across teams that did not report to you, through alignment and credibility rather than escalation, and engineers from those teams would vouch for it.

• You treat the code as the source of truth. You are comfortable diving into a large unfamiliar codebase, discerning its nuances from the source, and making impactful contributions within weeks.

• You know what makes a great open source project great: the code quality, and equally the review culture, the contributor experience, and the trust of the ecosystem that depends on it. You have been on the maintainer side of that relationship.

• You hold a high bar and make it stick. You have set standards that other engineers actually follow, pushed back when work below the bar tried to land, and done it in a way that made people want to work with you rather than around you.

• You still do the unglamorous work visibly. Reviews, on-call, migrations, and documentation remain part of the job at this level, and you treat them as the job rather than a distraction from it.

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.