What are the responsibilities and job description for the Technical Engineering Manager/Senior Manager, Informal Staking position at Informal Systems?
Technical Engineering Manager/Senior Manager, Informal Staking
Full Time (Remote)
Canada, USA
About Informal
Informal Systems is committed to making modern financial and Internet infrastructure more decentralized, secure and accessible to everyone. We develop critical blockchain infrastructure ourselves and assist other organizations design secure and efficient blockchain systems.
The Security Services team is dedicated to helping organizations design secure and efficient blockchain systems, encompassing a wide array of applications from decentralized exchanges (DEXs), smart contracts, and decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms to interchain connection protocols that enable seamless communication and interoperability between diverse blockchain networks. Informal Systems’ approaches combine manual code inspection with automated software analysis using our in-house formal verification and testing tools.
Informal Systems is a remote-first company with a presence in North America and Europe. We are structured as a worker’s cooperative, where important corporate actions are subject to one-person-one-vote democratic control by the member-employees.
Informal Staking
Our mission at Informal Staking (a division of Informal Systems) is to be a premier operator of decentralized network systems as we usher in a new age of open financial technologies.
To that end, we are a leading operator of staking nodes and interchain services on Cosmos-based blockchains. We’ve been validating the Cosmos Hub since genesis, and we’ve been running IBC relayers as long as they’ve existed. We run hybrid environments on bare-metal servers and cloud providers, having a strong commitment to security and best practices. We have a unique view into blockchain technology, many networks, and the communications between them. We are now actively expanding our service offerings into more blockchain ecosystems.
About the Role
As the Technical Engineering Manager for the Informal Staking team, you will oversee the team's performance and development to enhance the department's growth and profitability. In this role, you will develop, lead, and enable a team of expert infrastructure engineers by launching initiatives for growth and skills development, improving processes to ensure successful project/product delivery, and identifying and eliminating external risks. You will oversee and provide meaningful contributions to scoping, resourcing and delivery of projects and ensure deadlines and quality standards are met.
What your primary responsibilities will be to:
- Collaborate with the technical and project delivery teams to ensure seamless operation and assign people to projects based on their skill set.
- Ensure projects are properly scoped, including resource allocation and timely delivery.
- Onboard, coach, mentor, nurture, and grow a high-performing team.
- Lead and mentor the infrastructure engineering team, fostering a positive and collaborative team culture.
- Develop and grow our core operations and services, including infrastructure and application components
- Develop, execute, and communicate best practices for running blockchains and for supporting chain and software life cycles
- Architect, operate and maintain our infrastructure and container orchestration using Hashicorp software stack (Nomad, Consul, Vault), Ansible and Terraform
- Build and maintain effective monitoring solutions using Zabbix, response playbooks, and automation strategies
- Lead efforts to scale our infrastructure to thousands of nodes and millions of users
- Be part of an on-call rotation to respond to incidents that impact our service offerings. Approximately 1-week per month on average and includes weekends.
- Lead efforts to prevent incidents from happening, and to reduce their impact and time to recovery
- Conduct regular performance evaluations, provide feedback, and support career advancement and skill development within the team.
- Identify potential technical risks and challenges specific to the team's work and proactively address them to minimize disruptions and ensure project success
- Remain informed on active services projects to be a second line resource for escalation management.
- Encourage innovation within the team, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and exploration of new technologies within the team’s domain.
What we look for in a successful Technical Engineering Director:
- Deep knowledge and understanding of Infrastructure engineering and blockchain systems,
- 2 years in a leadership role, managing and scaling engineering teams.
- Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to inspire and motivate a diverse and distributed team.
- Excellent leadership and management skills.
- Strong organizational and planning skills.
- 5 years experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering or DevOps Engineering
- 2 years experience with orchestration tools like Nomad and related tooling similar to Consul/Vault
- 2 years experience with Zabbix Monitoring Solutions or similar software
- Drive, passion, and willingness to take initiative, lead projects, and work collaboratively with a remote team
- Ability to think creatively and develop solutions using sound engineering principles, operational discipline, mature automation, and best practices
- Ability to solve complex problems with the simple solutions that cater to circumstances and clients needs
- Experience with the orchestration and containerization software stacks such as Kubernetes and Hashicorp
- Experience with observability tools such as Zabbix, Grafana, etc.
- Experience with AWS services and networking or other cloud platforms like GCP / Azure
- Experience with modern programming languages such as Go or Rust
Some of our benefits include:
- A unique, caring and friendly culture (learn more about how we work here)
- 25 days (5 weeks) of paid vacation annually, plus 3 Spiritual Days
- Company closure from December 25th to January 1
- Annual Lifestyle benefits (reimbursements for gym memberships, fitness equipment, etc)
- A remote-first, flexible work environment
- A home-office stipend to set you up for success
- Annual company retreats
- Paid parental leave
- ….. and many more!
We are an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity in our organization. We are committed to equal employment opportunities and encourage applications from people of all race, religion, colour, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
