Staff Engineer - Blockchain Platform & Node Systems

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

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.