Head of Engineering

Why this role exists

We build and operate blockchain infrastructure for financial market infrastructure — settlement, custody and clearing institutions who put real value on the networks we run. We have signed clients with production dates this quarter, a platform that has to stand up on its own for the first time, and an engineering organization that has just been through a leadership transition.

You are the engineering leader for that organization — the person who owns what we've committed to ships, and who the engineers look to when a technical decision needs making.

What you'll own

• The delivery organization — core engineering (sequencer, node and backend services), smart contracts, and infrastructure/DevOps.
• Client delivery against contractual commitments. Several institutional programs are in flight with production dates between now and Q1, each with availability, latency and evidence requirements written into the contract. Availability definitions, maintenance windows, DR, incident process and the proof behind them are yours. System reliability engineering and on-call rota included.
• Operating production networks — including a public mainnet run under an arm's-length managed-service agreement, alongside sovereign and permissioned networks for clients.
• Work with the Security Lead to help set security standards for partners, clients and internal systems.
• The technical roadmap and its sequencing — working with Product and Sales to define what we build, what we buy, what we say no to, and the honest version of when.
• Completing the separation from our former parent. Observability, deployment tooling, identity and infrastructure-as-code all have to be rebuilt or properly handed over, under a live clock.
• Engineering standards and the release process — how we test, how we ship, how we roll back, how we review, and how we maintain.
• Being a credible technical voice with clients. Our buyers are institutional. They will ask you hard questions about resilience, custody of keys, and what happens at 3am, and they will judge the company by the answer.
• Leadership and people management — hire, lead, mentor, and develop engineering managers and team leads; foster a remote-first, high-performing, collaborative engineering culture; support performance management and career development; and liaise closely with team leads to coordinate priorities, dependencies, resourcing, and delivery across engineering.
• Contribute to major architecture or investment proposals.
• Meet customers or partners where engineering involvement is valuable.
• Managing and integrating company wide objectives into engineering team based measurable objective key results (OKRs) and communicating on these objectives to the organization.
• Engineering operating model — who owns what, who decides, and what escalates to you. You set decision rights with Product, Sales and Protocols so a stuck call does not sit in a meeting for two weeks.
• Delegation. Delivery, incidents and most design calls sit with engineering managers and tech leads. You are the exception path and the person who builds those managers, not doing every estimate and every review.
• How the organization uses AI in the actual work. You use it yourself every day and you make it the default for the teams, with the same bar we already apply to human-written code. This is practice, not an “AI strategy” slide.
• Cost management. You will strive to reduce operating costs wherever possible without reducing quality or productivity.

One area sits outside this role, although your work will align closely with it:

• Core protocols (Besu, Teku and related clients) sit with our Head of Protocols, reporting to the CEO. Some of your delivery dates depend on their commitments; that relationship is a partnership, not a reporting line.

What we are looking for

• Deep Ethereum and EVM experience.
• Has run an engineering team of 20+ across multiple teams, as a leader of leaders — and has done it at this company stage.
• Has owned production systems under contractual SLAs for demanding customers, and has personally been accountable for an outage in front of one.
• Deeply technical. You don't need to be the best engineer here, but you need to earn the respect of people who are — challenge a design, know when an estimate is optimistic.
• Distributed-systems depth. Blockchain experience is a real advantage; strong infrastructure and backend leaders from high-integrity domains (payments, exchanges, market infrastructure) will be taken seriously.
• Has hired well and retained people through a hard period.
• Someone with sound technical judgment, strategic thinking, commercial awareness, and strong prioritization skills.
• Direct. This team has a low tolerance for polish over substance. Say the hard thing early, and say it kindly, more light, less heat.
• People-first leader — empathetic, approachable, and committed to mentoring and developing others.
• Strong communicator — builds trust and communicates clearly across engineering and the wider business.
• Collaborative — works closely with team leads to align priorities, coordinate dependencies, and keep teams moving together.
• High emotional intelligence — self-aware, thoughtful, and comfortable navigating difficult conversations and change.
• Coach and multiplier — develops strong leaders, delegates effectively, and builds high-performing, autonomous teams.
• Pragmatic and organized — brings clarity and structure without unnecessary process.

Useful, not required

• L2 or ZK-rollup architecture.
• Regulated financial infrastructure — audit, change control, evidence, SOC 2 / ISO 27001.
• Experience of a carve-out, separation or post-acquisition integration.

What this role is not

• Not a box-checker, don’t add process for process sake.
• Someone who does not challenge or seek clarity.
• Someone who does not seek to understand why and what the value is for a task.
• Someone who feels like they have to be the loudest voice in the room and does not seek to listen first and leverage the intelligence of others.
• Someone who has not had experience managing engineering teams and who feels comfortable being a single IC.
• A 100% hands-on engineering role.

Working at Consensys

We are a fully remote, globally distributed company. We hire the best people wherever they are, work asynchronously, and judge each other on impact rather than hours or location. We offer competitive compensation, meaningful equity, and the chance to work on genuinely open source software at the frontier of web3.