Staff Engineer, Developer Infrastructure

We're hiring a Staff Engineer for the Developer Infrastructure team within Platform Engineering at Ava Labs. Platform Engineering builds and operates the core of the Avalanche network: consensus engines, the P-Chain, virtual machines, and the systems that let many virtual machines interoperate as one network.

Your job is to make the teams building those systems faster and more confident in what they ship. You will work across Platform Engineering to understand where development is slow, fragile, hard to reason about, or insufficiently automated, then build durable infrastructure, tooling, shared knowledge, and technical processes that make better engineering outcomes easier and more repeatable.

The work will typically span CI/CD, ephemeral environments, automated end-to-end testing, chaos and resilience testing, observability, performance infrastructure, and developer workflows, but we are less interested in narrow domain ownership than in the desire and ability to reduce engineering friction and risk. This is a hands-on role: you will be in the code, not adjacent to it.

WHAT YOU WILL 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. Illustrative examples:

• Support and evolve our 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 so others emulate you: debugging flaky tests, tightening release checks, improving documentation, reviewing tool adoption, and following through until a system is genuinely useful.

WHAT MAKES YOU A GOOD FIT

• You are a self-starter with deep curiosity. You are comfortable diving into someone else’s code to understand how it works, and you treat the 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 can explain the tradeoffs behind your calls.

• You build cross-team agreement through working software and demonstrated judgment rather than process mandates. Teams trust you because your work makes their work better.

• You care about reliability, and you are motivated by building the infrastructure that helps other engineers ship with confidence.

• You find the boundaries between application and infrastructure, product code and developer tooling, more fluid than people pretend.

• 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. You push for better engineering outcomes in a way that makes people want to work with you, not around you.

• You have operated at Staff scope before, regardless of title: you can point to a workstream you created or transformed, one that other teams came to depend on.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

Required

• 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, the ability to diagnose and pragmatically relieve bottlenecks.

• Working fluency with Linux, containers, and infrastructure-as-code.

Preferred

• 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.

THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF

• You want to set technical direction without writing code.

• You want to own a fixed infrastructure domain in isolation from the teams using it.

• You prefer prescribing process over building tools and feedback loops that make better practices easier to follow.

• You consider tests, documentation, migrations, debugging, and adoption work beneath Staff-level engineering.