Senior Systems Engineer (Staking)

Role Overview

As we expand our staking infrastructure, we seek a Senior Staking Systems Engineer at Nansen to build and maintain secure and scalable staking systems. You will design, deploy, and maintain highly secure and scalable staking infrastructure across multiple Proof-of-Stake (PoS) networks. You'll collaborate with multiple teams, ensuring the uptime, security, and performance of our validators, sentries, and RPC nodes. This role requires expertise in Linux systems administration, networking, automation, and a deep understanding of staking protocols.

You can be located anywhere in Europe, as our work is 100% online. The position is full-time.

Responsibilities

• Infrastructure Management: Deploy and manage validator, sentry, and RPC nodes for various PoS blockchains, ensuring high availability and scalability in both cloud and bare-metal environments. This includes ongoing system administration, performance tuning, and security hardening.
• Automation and IaC: Implement and maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform and configuration management tools. Develop and manage CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation.
• Security: Implement and maintain robust security practices across the entire staking infrastructure, including firewall configuration, access control, and validator key management.
• Monitoring and Alerting: Implement and maintain comprehensive monitoring and alerting to proactively identify and address performance, health, and security issues.
• Networking: Configure and manage network infrastructure, including load balancing and firewalls.
• Incident Response: Troubleshoot incidents, perform root cause analysis, and participate in an on-call rotation (including weekends when necessary).
• Collaboration: Work closely with other engineering teams and maintain detailed documentation of system configurations and procedures.

Requirements

Must have:

• 3+ years of experience in systems engineering, SRE, or a related role.
• Strong proficiency in Linux system administration.
• Experience with containers and Kubernetes.
• Proficiency with Terraform or similar tooling for infrastructure automation.
• Experience with monitoring and logging tools (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Experience managing fleets of machines with configuration management tools (e.g. Chef, Puppet, SaltStack, or Ansible).
• Strong networking knowledge (TCP/IP, HTTP/2, firewalls).
• Experience with gRPC and load balancing.
• Solid understanding of security best practices for Linux systems and networks.
• Python or Go experience for automation is highly desirable.
• Understanding of staking protocols and blockchain consensus mechanisms.

Nice to have:

• Knowledge of cryptography, experience with HSMs and key management solutions.
• Prior experience in staking or running blockchain infrastructure at scale, including validator key management.
• Familiarity with major staking protocols (Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Polkadot)

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and generous equity.
• Remote work environment with a flexible schedule.
• A team that values learning and is willing to test and adopt innovative solutions (including AI)
• A company culture that values speed, ownership, curiosity, simplicity, transparency and courage.
• Opportunities for personal and professional growth as the company scales
• Exposure to a global network of industry experts, partners and influencers.