Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

As a Staff Engineer at Ava Labs, you serve as the 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). You own the health of the codebase, set technical direction across teams that depend on it, and multiply the effectiveness of the engineers around you in the Platform Engineering Group, which maintains and advances the Avalanche blockchain and its ecosystem.

What you'll do

• Own AvalancheGo as its maintainer: maintain and advance the software powering the Avalanche network, manage contributions from both the team and the community fairly and effectively, hold the merge bar for network-critical code, assess contributions quickly, and steward backward compatibility for node operators and Avalanche L1 builders downstream of every release.
• Set and enforce engineering standards across the team, defining what production quality means.
• Design, build, and advance Avalanche's critical systems: consensus, networking (P2P), state management and sync, the VM interface, and performance of both network nodes and their EVM integrations.
• Champion reliability and production readiness by establishing observability standards (structured logging, metrics, tracing, profiling), defining SLOs for node performance, and leading incident review and postmortem culture for network incidents.
• Raise and define release quality by owning the engineering lifecycle for network-critical code: versioning and upgrade coordination, backward compatibility, staged rollouts across test networks, and rigorous 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 your context deliberately so the team can onboard, operate, and extend the node without you.
• Evangelize the project within the organization: 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 (Avalanche Community Proposal) process by originating and championing proposals, representing the node's constraints in protocol design conversations, and positioning AvalancheGo for upgrades before they activate on Fuji and Mainnet.

What you bring

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a staff or 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 as a 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, and end-to-end network testing, plus experience building CI that enforces it.
• 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.

About Ava Labs

Ava Labs, founded by Cornell computer scientists and partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders, builds on Avalanche to make it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3. The company has offices in New York City and Miami, and received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital.