Principal DevOps Engineer - Blockchain Infrastructure

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal DevOps Engineer to join our innovative team at Plasma, a purpose-built blockchain for stablecoin payments. As a Principal DevOps Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in building and maintaining the infrastructure that supports the next-generation blockchain for stablecoins. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technology in a fast-paced environment, where you will help redefine how money moves.

What You'll Do

• Own the reliability roadmap: lead the architectural evolution of our production systems toward higher availability, graceful degradation, and predictable failure recovery.
• Redesign for resilience: identify brittleness in existing infrastructure and drive systematic improvements, such as chaos engineering, redundancy patterns, and blast-radius reduction.
• Elevate observability: transform our monitoring from system health to risk awareness, ensuring we catch issues before they escalate to incidents.
• Strengthen operational rigour: improve our runbooks, incident response protocols, and post-mortem practices to compound reliability gains over time.
• Mentor and uplift the team: share hard-won lessons from operating at scale, raise the collective bar, and nurture a culture of ownership.
• Partner across engineering: work with protocol, client, and backend teams to bake reliability in at the design phase.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience operating distributed systems at scale, ideally in big tech, high-frequency trading, exchanges, or blockchain infrastructure.
• Deep system design knowledge: experience architecting platforms for fault tolerance and articulating trade-offs across availability, consistency, and latency.
• Fluency in Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud infrastructure, with a focus on architecture rather than just tooling.
• Proven track record of leading reliability transformations, taking production systems from 'good enough' to 'financial-grade.'
• Ability to lead through influence, elevating teams without diminishing prior work.

Nice to Have

• Experience with production blockchain: running L1/L2 infrastructure, validator operations, or RPC networks at scale.
• Background in high-frequency trading or fintech, where latency and uptime directly impact P&L.
• Familiarity with formal SRE practices: error budgets, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident management at scale.
• Experience with Rust-based systems, consensus protocols, or indexing infrastructure.
• Track record of building a reliability culture: fostering practices and mindsets that sustain high reliability.

What We Offer

• Above-market salary plus token compensation.
• Premium health insurance for you and your family fully covered by Plasma.
• Monthly wellness budget for gym, therapy, sauna & massage.
• A beautiful London HQ with gym access and daily food for those who thrive in an office environment.
• All the tools and tech you need to operate at your best.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation support for international candidates.