Validator Engineer

Ritual is building a sovereign execution layer for AI through its blockchain infrastructure, enabling AI-native operations on-chain and off-chain. Its flagship product, Infernet, bridges AI models with smart contracts.

The Validator Engineer will be responsible for maintaining and optimizing validator performance, uptime, and reliability. This role focuses on infrastructure automation, protocol-level performance tuning, and supporting validator operators across testnet and mainnet environments.

Ritual is seeking a Validator Engineer to ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of its validator infrastructure. You will work on deploying, maintaining, and optimizing validators while supporting network participants and improving system performance.

Responsibilities:
- Build and automate validator deployments across bare-metal and cloud environments
- Manage upgrades, snapshots, parameter changes, and hard forks with zero downtime
- Optimize execution and consensus clients for performance and reliability
- Develop and maintain deployment tooling, runbooks, and documentation
- Support validator operators and ensure smooth participation across networks
- Monitor system performance using logs, metrics, and tracing tools

Requirements:
- 4+ years of experience operating high-availability distributed systems
- Experience running PoS validators on EVM-based chains
- Proficiency in Go and Rust
- Strong understanding of blockchain protocol concepts (fork-choice, slashing, state sync)
- Expertise with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines
- Advanced Linux and networking knowledge with a focus on security and system hardening
- Strong observability practices (metrics, logs, tracing)

Nice to Have:
- Experience supporting external validator operators
- Contributions to execution or consensus client codebases
- Experience with GPU workloads or AI model deployment
- Familiarity with infrastructure partners, custodians, and auditors

Benefits:
- Competitive compensation with bonuses
- Premium healthcare fully covered
- Strong 401(k) match
- Remote-first flexibility
- Opportunities for virtual and in-person events

Join Ritual to help build cutting-edge infrastructure at the intersection of AI and blockchain.