Infrastructure engineer

Distributed, US only

-

Remote

Complicated, see text, but cash-only about

180k

Infrastructure

Crypto / Web3

Brief description

(The following description is longer than usual due to the unusual nature of this role.)

This role is a remote lead infrastructure engineering role at a small blockchain security company. Your responsibilities would center around monitoring, reliability, and security, but you'd also be building out new tools and infrastructure to support new and less-mature protocols. (As a concrete example, they've recently been working on building support for Eigenlayer, a re-staking protocol that allows small crypto networks to secure themselves via ETH staking.)

Relative to most infra roles, expect less scaling, more monitoring/reliability/security, less hooking up existing tools, and more building out bespoke tooling and working on immature technologies. Expect some on-call work and occasional midnight pages, given the reliability-heavy nature of the role, but they do have an on-call rotation on top of that.

The company itself is built on a "startup within a larger company" model and founded by veteran infra, crypto, and security engineers (e.g. Coinbase's former head of infra/security). Unlike most crypto companies, they are not minting their own tokens or doing a bunch of speculative investment. Instead, they're providing staking and validation services to institutional investors, so they can make a steady profit (and they have been profitable for some time) without much exposure risk.

They're small (27 people after 6 years) and plan to stay that way.

What they're looking for

[Required]

  • US work authorization and physically located within the US. If you're a Canadian citizen who wants to relocate to the US with a TN visa (this is relatively easy to do), or need an H1B transfer (but not sponsorship), those are OK as well.

  • 5 years experience at at least 2 different companies

  • Cloud experience in a professional environment. Experience as an infra engineer is preferred, but if you've worked substantially with infra in the context of a more mainline engineering job, that may be OK.

  • Some familiarity with and interest in crypto and in particular with proof-of-stake networks. You don't need to be an expert, though the more you know about it, the better.

  • SWE-equivalent coding ability (in addition to infra eng). You don't have to be the world's greatest coder, but you need to be able to build your own tools when required.

[Nice-to-have]

  • Experience with GCP (this is not a requirement and other cloud experience is fine, it's just a plus)

What they're offering

  • Fully remote role (though you need to be in the US).

  • Veteran and highly technical team, including the leadership. Their founders both led infra at large Silicon Valley companies (one at Twitter, one at Coinbase).

  • 150-200k base salary, plus a discretionary bonus. This bonus is widely variable from "nothing" to "a lot", and they've asked us not to give specific numbers.

  • Profit-sharing. Roughly speaking, they maintain an 18 month runway and pay their expenses, then remaining profits are split amongst the team.

  • Engineer-first culture. No PMs, no marketing teams. Engineer led, engineer driven.

  • Low meeting load. Only a few short regular meetings each week (a 1h staff meeting, a brief standup, and a demo day on Friday). They are, quote, "really big on focus time".

  • Flexible hours aside from those handful of meetings. They care about output, not when you do it.

  • Unlimited PTO, expectation to take at least a couple weeks a year.

  • 100% medical, dental, vision coverage for you and dependents.

  • Monthly wellness benefit and home office stipend