[Hiring] Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo @Ava Labs

Role Description

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.

• 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).
• Hands-on role that requires an Architect/Solver build, with tech lead responsibilities during coordinated network upgrades.
• 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.
• Hold the merge bar for network-critical code; assess contributions from the team and the community fairly and quickly.
• Steward backwards compatibility for the node operators and Avalanche L1 builders downstream of every release.
• Set and enforce engineering standards.
• Define what production quality means for the team.
• Design, build, and advance Avalanche’s critical systems:
• Contribute 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Evangelize the project within the org:
• Write ADRs, release notes, and technical communications.
• Engage external contributors.
• Model what a great open source citizen looks like.
• Drive protocol direction through the ACP process:
• Originate and champion Avalanche Community Proposals.
• Represent the node's constraints in protocol design conversations.
• Position AvalancheGo for upgrades before they activate on Fuji and Mainnet.

Qualifications

• A self-starter with insatiable curiosity.
• Meticulous attention to detail and an appreciation for clean, maintainable code.
• Belief in growing a culture of excellence.
• Understanding of what makes a great open source project great.
• Experience operating at Staff scope before.
• Ability to influence without authority.
• Comfortable diving into a large unfamiliar codebase.
• High standards and the ability to make them stick.
• Willingness to do the unglamorous work visibly.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a staff/lead level.
• Expert-level Go: deep fluency with concurrency model, profiling, performance tuning, and idiomatic API design.
• Significant open source experience - maintainer or sustained core contributor on a widely used project.
• Proven production experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed systems at scale.
• Strong testing discipline across the pyramid.
• Experience with release engineering for software users self-host and cannot be force-upgraded.
• Working fluency with Linux-based infrastructure, containerization, and observability tooling.
• BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience.

This Role Is Not for You If

• You want to write smart contracts or build dapps.
• You want a purely advisory position.
• You consider reviews, on-call, migrations, and documentation to be beneath the level.
• You are uncomfortable working in public.