Principal DevOps Engineer

About Plasma

Plasma is a purpose built blockchain for stablecoin payments, engineered for scale, speed, and security. We rebuilt the stack from first principles to support the next generation of real financial applications. The network is fast, reliable, and fully EVM compatible using Reth as the execution layer. We created PlasmaBFT, our own high performance consensus protocol, and reached the cost efficiency and predictability required for real economic activity at scale. We believe stablecoins will reshape global finance and expand access to a more open financial system. But they need purpose built infrastructure that reflects how stablecoins move, settle, and operate. That is what we are building. We are redefining how money moves.

Team Culture

At Plasma, you join a team that is rewriting how the world interacts with money. We hire people who are relentless about their craft and expect that same standard from everyone around them. This is where you will do the hardest and most meaningful work of your career. We work with trust, clarity, and ambition. Everyone owns their craft, moves with urgency, and contributes beyond their lane. We back each other, we debate hard, and we hold a high bar for what great looks like. Plasma is built for people who thrive on challenge and want to leave a mark.

We are looking for a Senior DevOps engineer to build and maintain the infrastructure supporting the next-generation blockchain for stablecoins. You will work closely with 4 of our wonderful DevOps engineers, valuing technical ambition and ownership.

What you will 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.

Who you are

• You have 10+ years of operating distributed systems at scale, ideally at companies where uptime was existential: big tech, HFT, exchanges, or blockchain infrastructure.
• You bring system design depth: you've architected platforms for fault tolerance, not just deployed them, and can articulate trade-offs across availability, consistency, and latency.
• You have a battle-tested intuition for failure: you know what breaks under load, under partition, under adversarial conditions, and you design accordingly.
• You are fluent in Kubernetes, Terraform, and cloud infrastructure, but you think in terms of architecture, not just tooling.
• You've led reliability transformations before, taking production systems from 'good enough' to 'financial-grade'.
• You lead through influence, not authority; you elevate teams without diminishing the work that came before.

Nice to have

• Production blockchain experience: running L1/L2 infrastructure, validator operations, or RPC networks at scale.
• Background in HFT, trading systems, or fintech where latency and uptime directly impact P&L.
• Experience with formal SRE practices: error budgets, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident management at scale.
• Familiarity with Rust-based systems, consensus protocols, or indexing infrastructure.
• Track record of building reliability culture: not just systems, but the practices and mindsets that sustain them.

What’s in it for you

At Plasma, we give you the environment and tools to do the best work of your life. Above market salary plus token compensation. Premium health insurance for you and your family fully covered by Plasma. Monthly wellness budget, whether for the 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 if you are joining the London office from abroad.