VP - Protocol Engineer

Location: Flexible / Hybrid

Employment Type: Full-time

Number of Openings: 1

Salary: 160,000 USD upwards

Maximum Experience Required: 10 years

Job Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable, and secure blockchain validator infrastructure across multiple blockchain networks.

• Deploy, secure, optimise, and operate validator nodes and RPC infrastructure for institutional-grade blockchain participation.

• Collaborate closely with infrastructure, SRE, DevOps, security, and engineering teams to improve automation, monitoring, and operational resilience.

• Implement and improve infrastructure tooling, observability systems, and operational workflows.

• Troubleshoot complex distributed systems, blockchain protocols, networking, and infrastructure-related issues.

• Build automation scripts and tooling to streamline deployment, scaling, recovery, and operational processes.

• Drive improvements across monitoring, alerting, performance optimisation, and incident response procedures.

• Research and stay up to date with emerging trends across blockchain infrastructure, validator operations, staking, and distributed systems.

• Participate in on-call rotations and support operational reliability across validator environments.

• Work closely with protocol foundations, staking providers, infrastructure vendors, and blockchain ecosystem partners.

• Contribute towards new product and infrastructure initiatives related to blockchain participation and custody services.

• Develop forward-looking operational and infrastructure strategies that support business scalability and reliability.

Essential Qualifications

• Strong experience as a Protocol Engineer, DevOps Engineer, SRE, Infrastructure Engineer, or Blockchain Infrastructure Engineer.

• Prior software engineering or application development experience using modern programming languages such as: Go / Golang

• Rust

• .Net / C#

• C / C++

• Python

• Strong scripting and automation capability using Bash, Python, Perl, or similar scripting languages.

• Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure, validator environments, or proof-of-stake ecosystems.

• Strong understanding of: Web3 infrastructure

• Validator operations

• RPC infrastructure

• Distributed systems

• Blockchain networking concepts

• Strong troubleshooting and debugging experience across distributed infrastructure and multi-system application environments.

• Deep familiarity with Linux systems, command line tooling, and infrastructure performance optimisation.

• Experience with cloud and infrastructure technologies including: AWS

• Azure

• GCP

• Docker

• Kubernetes

• VMware

• KVM

• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tooling such as: Prometheus

• Grafana

• Datadog

• ELK Stack

• LogDNA

• Strong understanding of infrastructure security concepts including: Encryption

• Access control

• Firewalls

• Network security

• Traffic filtering

• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical issues to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Excellent problem-solving capability with strong root-cause analysis skills.

Desired Experience

• 4+ years of software engineering or infrastructure engineering experience.

• Hands-on experience operating Solana, Ethereum, or similar validator / staking infrastructure.

• Experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration systems.

• Experience defining infrastructure as code using Terraform or similar tooling.

• Experience participating in or analysing on-chain activity.

• Ability to build backend services in addition to infrastructure.

• Experience working within digital asset, crypto, or institutional financial infrastructure environments.

Salary & Benefits

• Competitive base salary and discretionary bonus.

• Competitive paid time off.

• Company-paid health and protective benefits for employees and eligible dependents.

• Free virtual coaching sessions through Headspace.

• Opportunities to learn and grow within the crypto and blockchain industry.

• Exposure to cutting-edge blockchain infrastructure and validator operations.

• Smart, entrepreneurial, and highly technical colleagues.

• Flexible hybrid working environment.

Benefits may vary depending on location.

Application Process

Qualified candidates are invited to submit their CV directly for a confidential discussion regarding the opportunity.

This search is conducted by Spearpoint Search: The Search Firm For Capital Markets.

We are NOT incentivised to place. We are incentivised to be right. That means we tell clients when compensation is misaligned with the talent they need, we tell candidates when a role isn't what they think it is, AND we walk away from searches that don't have the conditions to succeed. This costs us fees. It is also why people call us back.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

Block quote

Ordered list

1. Item 1
2. Item 2
3. Item 3

Unordered list

• Item A
• Item B
• Item C

Text link

Bold text

Emphasis

^Superscript

_Subscript