Staff Engineer, Developer Infrastructure

Ava Labs

5d • $253,479 - $316,849

About The Position

Ava Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Developer Infrastructure team within Platform Engineering. This role focuses on enhancing the development process for teams building the core of the Avalanche network, including consensus engines, the P-Chain, and virtual machines. The engineer will identify and address areas of slow, fragile, or insufficiently automated development by building infrastructure, tooling, and processes. The work will involve CI/CD, ephemeral environments, automated testing, chaos engineering, observability, performance infrastructure, and developer workflows, with an emphasis on reducing engineering friction and risk through hands-on coding.

Requirements

• 7+ years writing production software.
• 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.
• Ability to diagnose and pragmatically relieve bottlenecks.
• Working fluency with Linux, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

Nice To Haves

• 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.

Responsibilities

• Partner with teams across Platform Engineering to understand their development, testing, release, observation, and debugging processes, identifying areas for improvement.
• Support and evolve the CI/CD pipeline (currently Bazel and GitHub Actions) to ensure it provides a fast and trustworthy signal of code quality.
• 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 enable coherent comparisons across runs, versions, and configurations.
• Improve confidence in the correctness and resilience of consensus, networking, and protocol-adjacent systems through advanced testing methodologies.
• Transform recurring team pain points into tools, automation, and documentation, and disseminate this knowledge to encourage adoption.
• Perform essential but less glamorous tasks such as debugging flaky tests, tightening release checks, improving documentation, and reviewing tool adoption to ensure systems are genuinely useful.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed