Head of Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Europe.

📋 Description

• Oversee the delivery organization for core engineering, smart contracts, and infrastructure/DevOps.

• Execute institutional client programs in accordance with commitments for availability, latency, and evidence.

• Manage availability definitions, maintenance windows, disaster recovery protocols, incident processes, proof, system reliability engineering, and on-call rotations.

• Operate public, sovereign, and permissioned production networks.

• Collaborate with the Security Lead to set security standards.

• Define and prioritize the technical roadmap in coordination with Product and Sales teams.

• Ensure complete separation from the former parent, including observability, deployment tooling, identity, and infrastructure-as-code.

• Establish engineering standards and release processes for testing, shipping, rollbacks, reviews, and maintenance.

• Act as a credible technical representative with institutional clients and partners.

• Recruit, lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers and team leads.

• Cultivate a remote-first, high-performance engineering culture.

• Oversee performance management and career development.

• Coordinate priorities, dependencies, resources, and delivery across the engineering team.

• Contribute to significant architecture and investment proposals.

• Align company-wide objectives with measurable engineering OKRs and communicate progress effectively.

• Establish engineering decision-making rights and escalation pathways with Product, Sales, and Protocols.

• Delegate responsibilities for delivery, incidents, and design decisions while serving as the exception pathway.

• Guide the practical adoption of AI in engineering practices.

• Aim to reduce operating costs without compromising quality or productivity.

• Engage with customers or partners where engineering involvement is beneficial.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience with Ethereum and the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).

• Proven experience leading an engineering team of 20+ across multiple teams as a leader of leaders, particularly at a similar company stage.

• Experience managing production systems under contractual SLAs for high-demand customers.

• Personal accountability for outages in front of clients.

• Profound technical expertise with the ability to critically evaluate designs and assess estimates.

• In-depth knowledge of distributed systems.

• Background in blockchain or strong leadership in infrastructure/backend roles in payments, exchanges, or market infrastructure.

• Proven success in hiring and retaining talent during challenging periods.

• Strong technical judgment, strategic thinking, commercial awareness, and prioritization abilities.

• Direct, empathetic, people-first, and approachable leadership style.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

• High emotional intelligence.

• Capability to coach, delegate effectively, and build autonomous teams.

• Pragmatic and organized approach to work.

• Eagerness to utilize AI daily and integrate it as a standard practice within the team.

• Helpful but not mandatory: experience with L2 or ZK-rollup architecture.

• Helpful but not mandatory: familiarity with regulated financial infrastructure, audit, change control, evidence, SOC 2 / ISO 27001.

• Helpful but not mandatory: experience with carve-out, separation, or post-acquisition integration.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive compensation package.

• Meaningful equity participation.

• Fully remote, globally distributed work environment.

• Asynchronous work opportunities.

• Chance to work on genuinely open source software at the forefront of web3.

• An inclusive environment that promotes equal-opportunity employment.

• Option to decline AI Notetaker interview recording without affecting candidacy.