Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

Staff Engineer - Platform Engineering Group

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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 Avalanche Go 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.

• Own Avalanche Go 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 Avalanche Go for upgrades before they activate on Fuji and Mainnet. Your bets play out over 6 to 18 months.

• 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…