Head of Engineering

Consensys•New York, NY

19d•Remote

About The Position

Consensys Incorporated is an independent blockchain infrastructure company, spun out of Consensys Software Inc. — one of the world's leading blockchain technology companies and the primary development organization behind the Ethereum ecosystem. We build and operate neutral, institutional-grade blockchain infrastructure that connects banks, asset managers, custodians, and financial market infrastructures to digital asset networks, meeting the non-negotiable standards of institutional finance: privacy, scalability, resilience, security, and regulatory readiness. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, and operating across the US, Europe, and Australia, Consensys Incorporated launched as an independent entity in September 2026 and is building the team to match its ambition. We build and operate blockchain infrastructure for financial market infrastructure — settlement, custody and clearing institutions who put real value on the networks we run. We have signed clients with production dates this quarter, a platform that has to stand up on its own for the first time, and an engineering organization that has just been through a leadership transition. You are the engineering leader for that organization — the person who owns what we've committed to ships, and who the engineers look to when a technical decision needs making.

Requirements

Deep Ethereum and EVM experience.
Has run an engineering team of 20+ across multiple teams, as a leader of leaders — and has done it at this company stage.
Has owned production systems under contractual SLAs for demanding customers, and has personally been accountable for an outage in front of one.
Deeply technical. You don't need to be the best engineer here, but you need to earn the respect of people who are — challenge a design, know when an estimate is optimistic.
Distributed-systems depth. Blockchain experience is a real advantage; strong infrastructure and backend leaders from high-integrity domains (payments, exchanges, market infrastructure) will be taken seriously.
Has hired well and retained people through a hard period.
Someone with sound technical judgment, strategic thinking, commercial awareness, and strong prioritization skills.
Direct. This team has a low tolerance for polish over substance. Say the hard thing early, and say it kindly, more light, less heat.
People-first leader — empathetic, approachable, and committed to mentoring and developing others.
Strong communicator — builds trust and communicates clearly across engineering and the wider business.
Collaborative — works closely with team leads to align priorities, coordinate dependencies, and keep teams moving together.
High emotional intelligence — self-aware, thoughtful, and comfortable navigating difficult conversations and change.
Coach and multiplier — develops strong leaders, delegates effectively, and builds high-performing, autonomous teams.
Pragmatic and organized — brings clarity and structure without unnecessary process.

Nice To Haves

L2 or ZK-rollup architecture.
Regulated financial infrastructure — audit, change control, evidence, SOC 2 / ISO 27001.
Experience of a carve-out, separation or post-acquisition integration.

Responsibilities

The delivery organization — core engineering (sequencer, node and backend services), smart contracts, and infrastructure/DevOps.
Client delivery against contractual commitments. Several institutional programs are in flight with production dates between now and Q1, each with availability, latency and evidence requirements written into the contract. Availability definitions, maintenance windows, DR, incident process and the proof behind them are yours. System reliability engineering and on-call rota included.
Operating production networks — including a public mainnet run under an arm's-length managed-service agreement, alongside sovereign and permissioned networks for clients.
Work with the Security Lead to help set security standards for partners, clients and internal systems.
The technical roadmap and its sequencing — working with Product and Sales to define what we build, what we buy, what we say no to, and the honest version of when.
Completing the separation from our former parent. Observability, deployment tooling, identity and infrastructure-as-code all have to be rebuilt or properly handed over, under a live clock.
Engineering standards and the release process — how we test, how we ship, how we roll back, how we review, and how we maintain.
Being a credible technical voice with clients. Our buyers are institutional. They will ask you hard questions about resilience, custody of keys, and what happens at 3am, and they will judge the company by the answer.
Leadership and people management — hire, lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers and team leads; foster a remote-first, high-performing, collaborative engineering culture; support performance management and career development; and liaise closely with team leads to coordinate priorities, dependencies, resourcing, and delivery across engineering.
Contribute to major architecture or investment proposals.
Meet customers or partners where engineering involvement is valuable.
Managing and integrating company wide objectives into engineering team based measurable objective key results (OKRs) and communicating on these objectives to the organization.
Engineering operating model — who owns what, who decides, and what escalates to you. You set decision rights with Product, Sales and Protocols so a stuck call does not sit in a meeting for two weeks.
Delegation. Delivery, incidents and most design calls sit with engineering managers and tech leads. You are the exception path and the person who builds those managers, not doing every estimate and every review.
How the organization uses AI in the actual work. You use it yourself every day and you make it the default for the teams, with the same bar we already apply to human-written code. This is practice, not an “AI strategy” slide.
Cost management. You will strive to reduce operating costs wherever possible without reducing quality or productivity.