Staff Engineer, Developer Infrastructure

As a Staff Engineer on the Developer Infrastructure team at Ava Labs, you will make the teams building Avalanche's core systems faster and more confident in what they ship. Platform Engineering builds and operates consensus engines, the P-Chain, virtual machines, and the systems that let many virtual machines interoperate as one network. You will work across the team to identify where development is slow, fragile, hard to reason about, or insufficiently automated, then build durable infrastructure, tooling, shared knowledge, and technical processes that reduce engineering friction and risk. This is a hands-on role: you will be in the code, not adjacent to it.

What you'll do

• Partner with teams across Platform Engineering to understand how they build, test, release, observe, and debug, then identify what is worth fixing and how.
• Support and evolve the CI/CD pipeline, currently built on Bazel and GitHub Actions, into a fast and trustworthy signal of code quality across unit tests, end-to-end tests, performance tests, and other release-critical checks.
• Make ephemeral and long-running test environments easier to provision, inspect, compare, and retire.
• Evolve observability infrastructure to collect useful data from diverse environments and compare coherently across runs, versions, and configurations to reveal regressions and highlight improvements.
• Improve confidence in the correctness and resilience of consensus, networking, and protocol-adjacent systems through end-to-end testing, fuzzing, chaos engineering, and failure-oriented test design.
• Turn recurring team pain points into tools, automation, and documentation, and spread the context through design reviews, examples, and technical writing so teams extend what you build without routing through you.
• Do the unglamorous work visibly: debugging flaky tests, tightening release checks, improving documentation, reviewing tool adoption, and following through until a system is genuinely useful.

What you bring

• 7+ years writing production software, with strong ability in Go and/or Rust.
• Experience in large legacy codebases with multiple teams and shared ownership boundaries.
• Experience building or significantly improving developer infrastructure, CI/CD, test infrastructure, observability, release tooling, or comparable engineering productivity systems.
• Strong testing discipline and the ability to diagnose and pragmatically relieve bottlenecks.
• Working fluency with Linux, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.
• You are a self-starter with deep curiosity and treat code as the source of truth.
• You have strong engineering judgment and an instinct for when code, tests, or systems are not maintainable, observable, or reproducible enough.
• You build cross-team agreement through working software and demonstrated judgment rather than process mandates.
• You care about reliability and are motivated by building infrastructure that helps other engineers ship with confidence.
• You listen carefully, yet you are still willing to prototype an idea before it is fully proven.
• You can make a high bar feel practical and push for better engineering outcomes in a way that makes people want to work with you.
• You have operated at Staff scope before, regardless of title: you can point to a workstream you created or transformed that other teams came to depend on.

Nice to have

• GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD systems; Bazel or similar build systems.
• Distributed systems, blockchain infrastructure, consensus systems, P2P networking, or other high-reliability systems.
• Kubernetes or similar orchestration frameworks.
• Large-scale observability: tracing, profiling, metrics.
• Using data to drive performance optimization.
• Chaos engineering, fuzzing, property-based testing, and failure-injection systems.

About Ava Labs

Ava Labs, founded by Cornell computer scientists and partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders, builds high-performance solutions for Web3 on Avalanche. The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with offices in New York City and Miami.