Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

About this 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.

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…