Validator Engineer

Summary

Join a passionate team at Ritual, a company building a sovereign execution layer for AI. As a Validator Engineer, you will be responsible for the uptime, performance, and reliability of Ritual’s validators. You will manage upgrades, snapshots, and sync performance, and serve as the primary technical contact for validator operators. This role requires expertise in high-availability distributed systems, Go and Rust programming, and Kubernetes/Helm. The ideal candidate will have experience with PoS validators on EVM-based chains and a strong understanding of protocol-level concepts. Ritual offers a highly competitive compensation package, top-tier benefits, and a fully remote or hybrid work option.

Requirements

• 4+ years operating high-availability distributed systems, including direct experience running PoS validators on EVM-based chains
• Proficient in Go and Rust, with the ability to read, debug, and extend both Execution Layer (EL) and Consensus Layer (CL) client code
• Strong grasp of protocol-level concepts such as fork-choice, evidence handling, slashing conditions, and state sync
• Expertise in Kubernetes/Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD workflows — automating everything from container builds to canary deployments
• Advanced Linux user with deep networking knowledge and a strong focus on system hardening and security
• Passionate about observability — logs, metrics, and traces are at the core of every operational decision

Responsibilities

• Build and automate bare-metal & cloud deployments for our validators using our existing full-fledged simulation framework
• Orchestrate client upgrades, parameter changes, and hard-forks with zero downtime across staging and mainnet
• Profile and patch critical paths for optimal performance of the execution and consensus clients
• Produce run-books, maintain clear documentation, and actively support validator operators via Discord to keep staking participation healthy

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience supporting external validator operators — including writing documentation, maintaining snapshots, and answering integration questions during testnet or mainnet launches
• Upstream contributions to both execution and consensus clients
• Experience orchestrating GPU workloads or other compute-intensive pipelines
• Familiarity with deploying, maintaining, and tuning open-source AI models
• Experience interfacing with infrastructure partners, custodians, and auditors in high-uptime environment

Benefits

• Highly competitive compensation package, including annual discretionary bonus & optimized tax structure compared to the vast majority of web3 startups
• Top 1% of benefits across the web3 startup space
• 100% of premiums covered on highest quality healthcare
• Aggressive company 401k match
• Fully remote and/or hybrid, up to you!
• Participate in virtual and in-person events