Sei Labs

Senior / Staff Engineer - Platform at Sei Labs (New York, NY)

Sei Labs· New York, NY·

Role details

Work type
Hybrid
Employment
Full-Time

Job description

About Sei Labs

Sei Labs builds open sourced technology for the high-performance Sei Blockchain, the first parallelized EVM Layer 1 blockchain designed to scale with the industry. The unique optimizations built into Sei enable Web3 applications to reach Web2 level scale and performance, driving the mass adoption of digital assets.

Our teams are comprised of former Google, Goldman Sachs, Robinhood, Nvidia, and Databricks veterans dedicated to onboarding the next billion users onto a vibrant ecosystem of applications.

Sei Labs has raised over $30M from top investors including Jump Crypto, Multicoin Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Distributed Global, Hudson River Trading, and Flow Traders.

Check out our website sei.io and docs docs.sei.io/dev-intro for more details.

PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT SEI

We're building Sei into a world-class L1 for decentralized finance. This role exists to make the safe path the default path for every engineer on the team — observable, tested, reversible, and fast. You'll be a foundational hire on a small Platform Engineering team with a broad mandate.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

  • Infrastructure & scale testing. Build and maintain Docker/Kubernetes harnesses for repeatable stress and scale testing, used by every core team as a pre-release gate. Run our multi-cloud footprint with explicit reliability and cost targets.
  • Release engineering & CI/CD. Consolidate CI/CD into reusable, standardized workflows. Own version tagging, hotfix paths, PR review scaffolding, and the full release lifecycle.
  • Observability. Single pane of glass for metrics, traces, and logs — correlated by block height, powered by OpenTelemetry. HA Prometheus, ELK, defined SLOs on every critical service.
  • Performance & chaos testing in CI. Automated chaos and performance tests gating 100% of releases. Regressions caught before merge, not by users.
  • Security & incident response. Run the bug and vulnerability workflow end to end — auditors, Immunefi, triage, postmortems. Every incident produces a new test, metric, or runbook.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

  • 5+ years building production systems at scale. You've designed and shipped infrastructure that other engineers rely on, and you understand it end to end — not just the surface API.
  • Security fundamentals. Threat modeling, common vulnerability classes, and how security work integrates into a development pipeline. You don't treat audits as a checkbox.
  • Distributed consensus understanding. You can reason about consensus protocols at the algorithmic level — safety vs. liveness, fault assumptions, the failure modes that show up in practice. You've debugged something non-trivial at this layer or studied it deeply enough to.
  • Benchmarking & performance bottleneck analysis. You design benchmarks that isolate variables. You profile under realistic load. You can walk into an unfamiliar system, find the bottleneck, and explain why it's the bottleneck before proposing a fix.
  • Live incident response. You've operated systems where outages had real consequences. You triage under pressure, communicate clearly, and turn postmortems into structural fixes that don't quietly expire.
  • End-to-end systems thinking. You've built systems, not just glued tools together. You have opinions on monitoring stacks, what belongs in CI vs. CD vs. runtime, and when to reach for chaos testing — and you can defend them.

BONUS

  • Blockchain or web3 infrastructure experience, especially with consensus, mempool, or storage layers.
  • Multi-cloud cost programs that didn't compromise reliability.
  • Experience integrating AI-assisted security tooling into a development pipeline.

Why work at Sei Labs

  • Team & Culture: Described as a "product-driven research & development lab" staffed by veterans from Google, Goldman Sachs, Robinhood, Nvidia, and Databricks. The culture is heavily technical and research-oriented, with a focus on open-source development.
  • Work Policy: Hybrid/On-site. Offices in San Francisco (HQ) and New York City. Job listings specify "Hybrid" or "Remote or Hybrid," indicating flexibility, though most roles require some in-office presence.
  • Notable Perks: Work at the frontier of blockchain scalability and speed. Employees get to work on extremely high-impact infrastructure problems (consensus, storage, trading systems) that handle billions of transactions.
  • Engineering Culture: Strong emphasis on R&D. The team is split ~18% technical (engineers, researchers) with active recruiting for Protocol Engineers, Platform Engineers, and Quantitative Developers. The work is on "category-defining" global-scale blockchain infrastructure.

Application questions