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
