Ava Labs

Location: New York; Brooklyn, NY Workplace: Hybrid Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform. As the Finance Lead at Ava Labs, you will help manage and strengthen our financial operations within the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency industry. This is a hands-on role requiring a self-starter who takes ownership from identifying a need through delivering the result. You will work closely with the CFO and cross-functional teams to drive financial clarity, maintain efficient operations, and ensure our financial practices align with regulatory requirements and business goals. You will partner with the CFO on financial execution and process improvement, with opportunities to contribute to broader strategic initiatives as you grow in the role. Reports to the CFO. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Financial Planning & Analysis: Lead financial planning and forecasting across the business. Build and maintain financial models to support budgeting, scenario planning, and departmental decision-making. - Hands-on Execution and Ownership: Personally drive finance projects from start to finish, including gathering and validating data, building models, investigating variances, and implementing solutions. Proactively identify what needs to be done and follow through to completion, independently resolving challenges and coordinating with others when their input or approval is needed. - Operations and Compliance Oversight: Manage day-to-day financial operations, ensuring compliance with statutory law and financial regulations. Oversee the handling of crypto and fiat transactions, ensuring efficient payments and settlements in close collaboration with the treasury team. Maintain and continuously refine existing systems for expense management, equity and compensation plans, travel arrangements, and accounts payable. - Cross-functional Collaboration: Serve as a financial liaison among engineering, compliance, business development, legal, and accounting teams. Work with People Operations and Human Resources to align financial processes with workforce planning. - Performance Management: Track and report key financial and operational metrics. Partner with the Head of Business Operations and Analytics to analyze trends and variances and flag business risks and opportunities. - Innovation and Process Improvement: Identify opportunities to refine financial processes and systems as the business scales, and recommend changes to existing workflows. Support the CFO in identifying processes that can be automated, planning, and implementation of automation. - Investor Relations and Strategic Communication: Collaborate with the C-suite to prepare and present materials for board meetings and strategic updates. Experience in venture capital fundraising is a plus, although direct fundraising activities are not currently planned. Create visually engaging and digestible financial presentations that simplify complex information for diverse audiences, enhancing communication both within the company and with external stakeholders. - Corporate Development and Strategy: Support the CFO on corporate development activity, including entity spinouts, divestitures, and asset sales, and help evaluate, structure, and execute potential investments, acquisitions, or similar strategic transactions as they arise. - Tax Responsibilities: Support tax planning and compliance efforts, ensuring tax positions align with overall fiscal policy and legal requirements. - Legal Agreement Review: Collaborate with the legal department to review the financial terms of contracts and agreements. - Financial Communication: Communicate financial insights and risks clearly to the CFO and relevant stakeholders to support informed decision-making. WHAT YOU WILL BRING - Education: BA or BS in Finance or Accounting; an MBA from a top-tier school is preferred. - Experience: Extensive experience in finance within the digital assets or fintech sector. Proven track record in cryptocurrency management, international payments, and trading platforms. Experience in investment banking, corporate development, and fast-paced startup environments is highly valued. - Adaptability and Resourcefulness: Comfortable being scrappy and resourceful in a dynamic environment, with sound judgment on trade-offs and prioritization under pressure. - Technical Skills: Advanced financial modeling and analytics skills, comfortable working with large datasets. SQL or statistics experience is a plus. - Industry Knowledge: Solid understanding of P&L, balance sheets, cash flow management, and general accounting principles. Familiarity with the regulatory landscape for cryptocurrencies is a plus. - Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams, and high integrity. - Self-Starter with a Hands-on Approach: Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous requests into concrete deliverables with minimal supervision. Willing to roll up your sleeves and perform detailed work yourself, take initiative without waiting for direction, and deliver results without relying on a supporting team to execute. - Leadership and Team Management: Comfortable mentoring or overseeing junior finance team members as the team grows while remaining directly responsible for hands-on execution and delivery. - Attention to Detail and Strategic Perspective: Strong attention to detail balanced with the ability to see the bigger picture; able to think critically and solve problems under deadlines. CULTURAL ALIGNMENT At Ava Labs, we thrive in a high-accountability, high-urgency environment where execution matters more than location. We value individuals who don’t just need structure - but create it. They don’t need reminders - they own the calendar. If you’re ready to lead a finance team at the bleeding edge of crypto innovation, you won’t just keep up - you’ll set the pace. If you’re excited about shaping the financial systems that power the next generation of decentralized technology, this is your moment to lead. (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.) WHY AVA LABS? If you've ever thought about joining an early stage Web3 company - this is it! We're a global, world-class team of experts in computer science, economics, finance, marketing, and law with offices in New York City and Miami. We're highly passionate about Web3 and redefining the way people build and use finance and decentralized applications of all kinds. The company received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Join us and be a pioneer in a new technology that will have implications across a range of verticals such as finance, gaming, investing, collectibles, among many others. Ava Labs is committed to diversity in the workplace and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Location: Remote (Global); Brooklyn, NY Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform. About the Role Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform. We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Platform Engineering Group. This team is responsible for maintaining and advancing the Avalanche blockchain and its ecosystem. Ava Labs is hiring a Staff Engineer into the Platform Engineering Group to serve as a full-time maintainer of AvalancheGo and the technical anchor for the node domain: consensus, peer-to-peer networking, state sync, the VM plugin interface, and the node's integration with the C-Chain EVM (coreth and libevm). This is a hands-on role that requires an Architect/Solver build, with tech lead responsibilities during coordinated network upgrades. You will own the health of the codebase, set the technical direction of the domain across the teams that build on it, and multiply the effectiveness of the engineers around you. What You Will Do - Own AvalancheGo as its maintainer: Maintain and advance the software powering the Avalanche network, as well as its environments. Manage contributions from both the team and the community in a fair, effective, and thoughtful manner. You hold the merge bar for network-critical code; assess contributions from the team and the community fairly and quickly, and steward backwards compatibility for the node operators and Avalanche L1 builders downstream of every release. Your review will be the last gate before code reaches every validator. - Set and enforce engineering standards. Define what production quality means for the team. - Design, build, and advance Avalanche’s critical systems. You’ll be contributing directly to the critical systems in the Avalanche network: consensus, networking (P2P), state management and sync, the VM interface, and performance of both the network nodes and their EVM integrations. - Champion reliability and production readiness. Establish observability standards (structured logging, metrics, tracing, profiling), define SLOs for node performance, and lead incident review and postmortem culture for network incidents. - Raise and define release quality. Own the engineering lifecycle for network-critical code: versioning and upgrade coordination, backward compatibility, staged rollouts across test networks, and hard test quality metrics (unit, property, fuzz, race-detection, and end-to-end network tests) before anything ships. - Mentorship. Mentor senior engineers into larger scope, run design reviews that measurably change outcomes, and spread your context deliberately so the team can onboard, operate, and extend the node without you.Turn a team of individual contributors into a team with shared standards, shared context, and a high quality ceiling. Becoming a single point of failure is a failure mode of this role, and you will be expected to resist it. - Evangelize the project within the org: Write ADRs, release notes, and technical communications; engage external contributors; and model what a great open source citizen looks like. - Drive protocol direction through the ACP process. You originate and champion Avalanche Community Proposals, represent the node's constraints in protocol design conversations, and position AvalancheGo for upgrades before they activate on Fuji and Mainnet. Your bets play out over 6 to 18 months. What Makes You a Good Fit - A self-starter with insatiable curiosity combined with being comfortable diving into someone else’s code to understand how it works. You treat the code as the source of truth and are able to discern nuances from there. - Meticulous attention to detail and an appreciation for clean, maintainable code. You create software as much for the end user as for the love of the craft. - You believe in growing a culture of excellence. As a Staff Engineer you will set the definition for development standards among your team, as well as cultivating the quality you want to see in the developers you work with. - You understand what makes a great open source project great. Not just in terms of code quality, but in terms of its ecosystem, its community, and its contributors - You have operated at Staff scope before, irrespective of whatever your title said. You can point to a workstream you created rather than inherited, one that other teams came to depend on, and to the case you built to get it funded. - You influence without authority. You have driven technical direction across teams that did not report to you, through alignment and credibility rather than escalation, and engineers from those teams would vouch for it. - You treat the code as the source of truth. You are comfortable diving into a large unfamiliar codebase, discerning its nuances from the source, and making impactful contributions within weeks. - You know what makes a great open source project great: the code quality, and equally the review culture, the contributor experience, and the trust of the ecosystem that depends on it. You have been on the maintainer side of that relationship. - You hold a high bar and make it stick. You have set standards that other engineers actually follow, pushed back when work below the bar tried to land, and done it in a way that made people want to work with you rather than around you. - You still do the unglamorous work visibly. Reviews, on-call, migrations, and documentation remain part of the job at this level, and you treat them as the job rather than a distraction from it. This Role Is Not for You If - You want to write smart contracts or build dapps. This is node and protocol engineering, several layers down. - You want a purely advisory position. - You consider reviews, on-call, migrations, and documentation to be beneath the level. They remain part of the job, done visibly. - You are uncomfortable working in public. Your code, your reviews, your design docs, and occasionally your mistakes will be visible to the entire ecosystem. What You Will Bring - 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a staff/lead level (or clearly performing at that scope), with a track record of raising team-wide engineering quality. - Expert-level Go: deep fluency with the concurrency model (goroutines, channels, the race detector), profiling and performance tuning (pprof, benchmarks), module and dependency management, and idiomatic API design in large codebases. - Significant open source experience - maintainer or sustained core contributor on a widely used project, with a public record of reviews, RFCs/design docs, and community engagement (a GitHub profile we can read is worth more than any bullet on a resume). - Proven production experience designing, shipping, and operating distributed systems at scale: consensus or replication, P2P networking, state synchronization, or comparable high-availability systems. - Strong testing discipline across the pyramid: unit, property-based/fuzz, integration, and end-to-end network testing, plus experience building CI that enforces it (GitHub Actions preferred). - Experience with release engineering for software users self-host and cannot be force-upgraded: semantic versioning, backward compatibility, migration paths, and coordinated network upgrades. - Working fluency with Linux-based infrastructure, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent). - BS in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience. (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.) WHY AVA LABS? If you've ever thought about joining an early stage Web3 company - this is it! We're a global, world-class team of experts in computer science, economics, finance, marketing, and law with offices in New York City and Miami. We're highly passionate about Web3 and redefining the way people build and use finance and decentralized applications of all kinds. The company received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Join us and be a pioneer in a new technology that will have implications across a range of verticals such as finance, gaming, investing, collectibles, among many others. Ava Labs is committed to diversity in the workplace and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Location: Remote (Global) Looking to join a world-class blockchain development team? Ava Labs makes it simple to deploy high-performance solutions for Web3, led by innovations on Avalanche. The company was founded by Cornell computer scientists, who partnered with Wall Street veterans and early Web3 leaders to execute a promising vision for redefining the way people build permissionless networks. Ava Labs is redefining the way people create value with Web3. Join us as we empower people to easily and freely digitize all the world’s assets on one open, programmable blockchain platform. Lead the engineering org building Fortary's institutional digital asset platform: custody, trading, lending, staking, and treasury management for regulated financial institutions. You'll own the architecture and technical strategy for our distributed MPC custody system, grow the team, and partner with Product, Security, and executive leadership to ship secure, resilient infrastructure at institutional scale. This is a leadership role at the intersection of distributed systems, applied cryptography, and institutional finance. You set technical direction, you're accountable for what ships, and you build the org that ships it. What you'll do - Lead multiple teams delivering Fortary's custody, transaction authorization, key management, wallet infrastructure, and blockchain integrations - Own the architecture and roadmap for the distributed MPC custody platform, including disaster recovery, governance, and transaction policy controls - Partner with Product, Security, BD, and executives to prioritize investments against customer, regulatory, and business needs - Support multiple deployment models: managed platform and licensed software - Ensure engineering practices meet the security, compliance, and governance bar required as Fortary moves toward chartered-institution status - Lead incident response for outages, security events, and key management scenarios - Hire, mentor, and grow engineering managers and senior engineers - Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering across the org What you'll bring - 10+ years in software engineering, 5+ leading teams shipping production-scale secure distributed systems - Track record owning large-scale, security-critical platforms from architecture through production - Deep expertise in modern cryptography and secure key management: MPC, threshold signatures, TEEs, HSMs - Experience building cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, IaC, CI/CD, observability) with security and resilience as first-order concerns - Fluency in the compliance frameworks for regulated finance: SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, AML/KYC, and awareness of the SEC/CFTC/OCC/MiCA landscape - Experience across digital asset infrastructure: custody, trading, staking, treasury, and blockchain settlement - Ability to communicate credibly with executives, institutional customers, auditors, and regulators Bonus - Experience scaling an org toward a chartered or licensed financial entity - Background delivering both managed-service and licensed-software products (**This is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, a final offer amount may vary based on factors including but not limited to experience and geographic location.) WHY AVA LABS? If you've ever thought about joining an early stage Web3 company - this is it! We're a global, world-class team of experts in computer science, economics, finance, marketing, and law with offices in New York City and Miami. We're highly passionate about Web3 and redefining the way people build and use finance and decentralized applications of all kinds. The company received early-stage funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Initialized Capital, and Polychain Capital, with angel investments from Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Join us and be a pioneer in a new technology that will have implications across a range of verticals such as finance, gaming, investing, collectibles, among many others. Ava Labs is committed to diversity in the workplace and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.