Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Own AvalancheGo as its maintainer: maintain and advance the software powering the Avalanche network and its environments, and assess contributions from the team and the community fairly and quickly
• ▹Hold the merge bar for network-critical code and steward backwards compatibility for node operators and Avalanche L1 builders; your review is the last gate before code reaches every validator
• ▹Set and enforce engineering standards and define what production quality means for the team
• ▹Design, build and advance Avalanche's critical systems: consensus, networking (P2P), state management and sync, the VM interface, and the performance of 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
• ▹Raise release quality: own 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)
• ▹Mentor senior engineers into larger scope, run design reviews that measurably change outcomes, and spread context deliberately
• ▹Evangelize the project within the org: write ADRs, release notes and technical communications, and engage external contributors
• ▹Drive protocol direction through the ACP process: 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

Requirements

• ▹8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years 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
• ▹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, 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
• ▹Have operated at Staff scope before, irrespective of title: a workstream you created rather than inherited that other teams came to depend on
• ▹Influence without authority: driven technical direction across teams that did not report to you, through alignment and credibility rather than escalation
• ▹Treat the code as the source of truth: comfortable diving into a large unfamiliar codebase and making impactful contributions within weeks
• ▹Know what makes a great open source project great: code quality, review culture, contributor experience and ecosystem trust; have been on the maintainer side
• ▹Hold a high bar and make it stick; do the unglamorous work (reviews, on-call, migrations, documentation) visibly as part of the job
• ▹Comfortable working in public: your code, reviews, design docs and occasionally your mistakes are visible to the entire ecosystem

Soft skills

About the company

Ava Labs is the Web3 company behind the Avalanche blockchain, founded by Cornell computer scientists together with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders. It has offices in New York City and Miami.