VP, Protocol / Backend Engineer

Who We Are:Galaxy is a global leader in digital assets and data center infrastructure, delivering solutions that accelerate progress in finance and artificial intelligence. We believe that blockchain and digital asset innovation will transform how value moves through the world – and we’re building the products and services to make that future a reality. Our institutional digital assets platform spans trading, investment banking, asset management, staking, self-custody, and tokenization technology. We also invest in and operate cutting-edge data center infrastructure to power AI and high-performance computing, addressing the growing demand for scalable energy and compute in the U.S. We work at the intersection of finance and technology, helping institutions, startups, and developers navigate a digitally native economy. Led by CEO and Founder Michael Novogratz, our team blends deep crypto expertise with institutional experience and a shared commitment to shaping the future of Web3 and AI. Galaxy is headquartered in New York City, with offices across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. To learn more about our businesses and products, visit www.galaxy.com.What We Value:We are a diverse team of free thinkers, and fast movers united to help investors and creators energize the global economy. We are looking for individuals who thrive in a culture of builders and overachievers and embrace high performance, transparent feedback, and a mission-first approach. Our culture shapes our way of working and gets us where we want to be.Seek Excellence.Be Selective To Be Effective.Be Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled.Disagree Transparently.Encourage Independent Decision-Making.Build Dream Teams.Who You Are:You are an experienced Protocol, DevOps or SRE Engineer with;- Prior software engineering or application development experience in modern programming language (.Net, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, etc.) - Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure or strong knowledge of the blockchain domain (proof-of-stake consensus, web3, RPC, etc) particularly Solana or ETH. - Deep Observability Know-how: metrics, tracing, block/slot analytics, alerting, incident debugging, and performance dashboards along with research aptitude and a desire to never repeat the same problem twice. - Performance engineering experience**:** profiling, lock contention, cache behavior, async networking, kernel/network tuning, benchmarking, and p99 latency reduction. - Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and virtualization technologies (VMWare, KVM, Docker or similar). - A security mindset: awareness of adversarial transaction flows, spam/DoS resistance, economic exploits, key management, and safe handling of privileged validator infrastructure. - Strong written and verbal communication skills with an ability to distill information to both technical and non-technical audiences.What You’ll Do:Engineer resilient distributed services related to our blockchain participation offerings that handle high-throughput transaction flow, backpressure, retries, failures, and real-time coordination.Dive into Rust + systems programming**:** engaging in low-latency, memory-safe backend work and build comfort in reading/modifying Solana validator-adjacent code.Integrate with validator or node pipelines and reason about consensus, block production, transaction propagation, execution limits, and fee markets.Identify & implement solutions for your domain where process, automation or tooling can significantly improve our ability to operate our systems.Develop a present and forward looking view into what's happening in each part of your domain and how it applies to the business. Establish and communicate views that inform leadership and organizational strategy.Continuously research and stay up-to-date with emerging trends in the Web3/Blockchain space.Identify, scope and build on new product opportunities that may bring value to the businessDebug complex distributed blockchains and protocols to improve our participation.Participate in and make improvements to, domain specific on-call rotations to ensure the continued reliability and uptime of our services.What We’re Looking For:Prior software engineering or application development experience in modern programming language (.Net, Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, etc.)Demonstrated experience working with blockchain infrastructure or strong knowledge of the blockchain domain (proof-of-stake consensus, web3, rpc, etc)Strong concepts of custody key management, generation, HSMs and MPC technologies.Experience or awareness in working with Chainlink systems, services or ecosystem.Ability to script in a high-level scripting language like Python, Perl or bash coupled with an ability to identify human processes that can be scripted and automated.Deep familiarity with compute-infrastructure systems, tooling, observability, debugging strategies along with research aptitude and a desire to never repeat the same proble