Staff Engineer, AvalancheGo

About the role

This role centers on AvalancheGo as the core focus of ownership, where you act as the primary maintainer for the node software that underpins the Avalanche L1. You will define and enforce what production quality means for the platform engineering group across consensus, networking, and state management subsystems. You are expected to architect solutions for long term reliability while mentoring engineers so that the team can operate and extend the node platform without constant dependency on a single person. Your reviews will serve as the final gate for network critical changes, and you will steward backwards compatibility for validator operators and downstream builders with every release.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Assume ownership of AvalancheGo as its maintainer, advancing the software that powers the Avalanche network and managing contributions from both internal teams and the broader community in a fair and effective manner.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for production readiness, serving as the authority on quality expectations for the node platform.
• Design, build, and advance critical systems within the Avalanche network, including consensus, peer-to-peer networking, state synchronization, the VM plugin interface, and the performance of both network nodes and their C-Chain EVM integrations.
• Champion reliability and production readiness by establishing structured logging, metrics, tracing, and profiling standards, while defining service level objectives for node performance and leading incident review and postmortem processes.
• Raise and define release quality by owning the full engineering lifecycle for network critical code, covering versioning, upgrade coordination, backward compatibility, staged rollouts across test networks, and rigorous quality metrics such as unit tests, property-based tests, fuzzing, race detection, and end-to-end network testing.
• Mentor senior engineers and grow their scope, running design reviews that measurably change outcomes and deliberately spreading context so the team can onboard, operate, and extend the node platform without creating a single point of failure.
• Evangelize the project across the organization by writing architecture decision records, release notes, and technical communications, engaging effectively with external contributors, and modeling exemplary open source citizenship.
• Drive protocol direction through the Avalanche Community Proposal process, originating and championing ACPs, representing node constraints in protocol design discussions, and positioning AvalancheGo for upcoming upgrades on both Fuji and Mainnet with bets that unfold over six to eighteen month horizons.

Requirements

You are a self starter with insatiable curiosity, comfortable diving into unfamiliar codebases and treating the source code as the ultimate source of truth to understand nuanced behavior.

You bring meticulous attention to detail and a commitment to clean, maintainable software, building systems that balance end user needs with the craft of engineering.

You grow a culture of excellence by setting development standards for your team and cultivating the quality you expect from the engineers around you.

You communicate clearly and persuasively, using written documents such as architecture decision records and release notes to align stakeholders and external contributors.

You are comfortable making technical bets that extend over multiple release cycles, understanding that protocol direction plays out across six to eighteen month windows on Avalanche L1 and test networks.

You have experience with distributed systems, including consensus algorithms, peer-to-peer networking, state synchronization, and virtual machine plugin interfaces, and you care deeply about reliability and observability.

You are disciplined in software lifecycle practices, including versioning, upgrade coordination, backward compatibility, and rigorous testing through unit tests, property tests, fuzzing, race condition detection, and end-to-end integration tests.

You engage constructively with open source communities, contributing reviews, facilitating design discussions, and maintaining healthy contributions from both internal and external stakeholders.

Nice to have

Experience with Avalanche consensus mechanics, Go systems programming, and production node operations would align closely with the responsibilities described in this role.

Practical notes

This role is full-time and remote on a global basis.