DevOps Engineer,📍Remote/Paris

What is SkillZ?

The blockchain space is striving with awesome teams building new products and solutions every day that will enable a new range of decentralised, permissionless usages. In order to do so, blockchain networks need to perform as expected, and that requires Blockchain Infrastructure.

Blockchain is hard. Infrastructure is hard too. So is Blockchain Infrastructure.

We strive to provide a wide range of actors, from Investors to Builders, with the infrastructure they demand to execute their accomplish their vision.

We're a small team of passionate blockchain builders, operating remotely with a part of the team based in Paris.

What's it like to work at SkillZ?

We've implemented a remote-first culture and organisation, so you can work from anywhere in Europe. We maintain core working hours of 8AM to 5PM UTC, when we're all online and available at the same time. We strive to be clear in our written communication.

We're early, so you'll have an opportunity to shape not just our product, but the company itself: who we work with, and how we work together.

Below are the values we share as a team, so if you like these, you'll enjoy working here. (And if you don't like them, please tell us what we're missing in our thinking!)

• We value high standards over quick wins. We want people to do their best work to build the decentralized future and be proud of it. We want to be impressed with the people we hire and have them show us how it's done. Reality has a surprising amount of details, and we rigorously care about these; good enough isn't good enough.
• We value reliability over speed. A culture of shipping a reliable and secure product puts priorities into sharp focus and helps us efficiently use our constrained resources by limiting breakage and fixing. More importantly, we can act as a trusted partner for our clients who rely on us to support protocols and projects they believe in. We make sure we don't break what's critical and that we ship battle-tested features. We've only one shot at making a first impression, and it'd better be excellent.
• We value trust over comfort. We share all aspects of our business with our team to empower them to make the right calls in their day-to-day and trust them to keep information within the circle. We want to know about problems (and wins) as fast as possible and solve them with a focus on raising our standards while avoiding personal blame. We believe that trust and transparency enable us to ship reliable products, building our reputation with our clients and partners.
• We value empathy over industry recognition. Empathy with customers is a must better driver of our roadmap than competitors' features. We take a step back, put ourselves in the shoes of people we are serving, and think about making their lives better. We take a shot at this and iterate until we succeed. Then, we do it again. We are in the business of making our customers happier (a never-ending task), not in the business of matching competitive offerings or making commentators happy. We strive to be empathetic internally as well, with a focus on people development with regular feedback.
• We value the learn-it-all over the know-it-all. The pace of technological improvement has never been faster while the general public has never been less excited about innovation and discovery. Ultimately we do what we do because Web 3.0 is the most creative space in the tech world and for the coming years. We also believe the world is incomplete and would be better with the possibilities offered by decentralized technologies. We want to share this journey with people who can take a step back and share our optimism and belief that technology is making the world better and bringing the future closer to us. We believe that like-minded people have a growth mindset and aim at learning anything and everything, continually developing and growing for the better, as part of a team of “The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all".

What are we up to?

We have two on-going projects:

• Pocket Network
  • Pocket Network is a decentralized network enabling access to blockchains such as Ethereum and Tezos to help dApps developers focus on their application rather than on the infrastructure
  • We offer staking-as-a-service: clients deposit their Pocket tokens with us and we validate transactions for them. They earn a reward for validating the transaction
  • See "Proof-of-stake" in this Crypto Glossary
• Ethereum 2.0
  • Staking 2.0 on Ethereum is a large market. We aim at offering a competitive offer partnering with the leading companies in the space.

What will you be doing?

We're looking for someone to be a backend engineer at SkillZ. In this role, you’ll be responsible for:

• Building the Product: You'll be working closely with the Product and Software teams to plan, architect, and implement our core product. You'll take part in the construction of the roadmap, with the rest of the team. As an early engineer, you’ll have a prominent voice in all engineering decisions. We’ll iterate as a team on the product experience, with current users to get it just right, while also ensuring we’re maintaining a clean codebase so we can move fast.
• Improving the product: You'll be responsible to regular application deployment, improving the reliability of the process, testing at the earliest in the development cycle, implementing continuous integration and continuous testing, and conducting close monitoring of operational and production quality through quantifiable success metrics. This enables the team to be united behind a high-quality product everyone can be proud of, and bring new and innovative features more quickly.
• Supporting the support/sales team: The support/sales team is the privileged point of contact for our users. Working closely with them, you'll help to answer technical requests and collect feedback from the product, and easing up any friction points that show up.
• Building our culture: Work we do today and the way we do it can make our future work better and faster. Since our product is tackling a complex problem, we’ll need to build a foundation that is flexible and allows us to adapt to a wide variety of blockchain protocols and product needs. By investing in our own productivity, we can get more done with less – we can work smarter.
• Growing the Team: Everyone on the early team plays an important role in attracting, closing, and growing other talented team members. The biggest factor in our ability to build amazing products is the team, so we look to you to help set the example for the kind of team we all want to build together.

Who are we looking for?

• Blockchain Generalist - We have to keep in sight the finality of our product, building infrastructure for the decentralised space, ie blockchain. For that, you'll need to have knowledge of the fundamentals of blockchain technology or at least to have a genuine interest and motivation to learn about this space. Knowledge about Tendermint would be a plus!
• Architect Mindset - As a DevOps, you will need to understand how the different components work together as a system and be able to make technical design improvement to the architecture in order to improve performance, reliability and availability of the product.
• Technical skills - You will need to have a good knowledge of container systems, such as Docker. Previous experience with Kubernetes and its tooling (Prometheus, Elastic Search, Datadog, etc.) would be a big plus, as would SysAdmin previous experiences. We also use AWS, with IaaC through Terraform and the platform is developed in Go and JavaScript.
• Quick learner and quick thinker - Blockchain space is new and is continuously innovating, so we need to be quick to adapt to new releases and features of our favourite protocols. We're looking for someone that is able to dig in the mechanics of the codebase, to understand how it works and how to improve it and debug it thoroughly if necessary.
• Available Full-Time

What we offer

• Competitive salary and equity
• Work remotely or in our central Paris office
• Over 5 weeks of paid vacation
• MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitor and accessories
• Latest productivity software like Notion and Linear

How do I apply?

If you're interested in this role, please email [email protected] with your CV / LinkedIn / GitHub, and a link to your portfolio of work and quick email on how our mission and values resonate with you would be a nice bonus.

Thanks!