Director of Technical Operations

Director, Technical Operations

Company: EigenLayer

Location: United States

Workplace: Remote

Employment Type: Full-time

Job Function: Technical Operations, Infrastructure, Engineering Operations

Seniority Level: Director

About EigenLayer

EigenLayer is a decentralized infrastructure protocol built on Ethereum that enables restaked assets to provide cryptoeconomic security to a new generation of actively validated services (AVSs).

The EigenLayer ecosystem brings together stakers, operators, AVS developers, infrastructure providers, and application builders. Its technology stack supports decentralized operators and services spanning data availability, verification, middleware, distributed infrastructure, and other blockchain-based applications.

About the Role

The Director, Technical Operations will lead the operational strategy and execution for EigenLayer's technical infrastructure and production systems.

This senior leadership role will be responsible for building scalable operational processes that ensure the reliability, availability, security, and performance of critical infrastructure supporting EigenLayer and its broader ecosystem.

The Director will work closely with Engineering, Protocol, Infrastructure, Security, Product, Developer Relations, Ecosystem, and executive leadership teams to establish operational excellence across a highly distributed and rapidly evolving technical environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a company-wide technical operations strategy aligned with EigenLayer's protocol and ecosystem objectives.
• Lead operational readiness for critical production infrastructure, services, and protocol releases.
• Establish scalable processes for infrastructure deployment, monitoring, maintenance, incident response, and service reliability.
• Oversee operational standards for distributed infrastructure supporting EigenLayer services and ecosystem participants.
• Partner with Engineering and Infrastructure teams to improve system availability, performance, resilience, and scalability.
• Establish comprehensive monitoring, alerting, observability, and operational dashboards.
• Define and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and operational performance standards.
• Lead major incident response and establish effective escalation and communication procedures.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and ensure corrective and preventive actions are implemented.
• Develop disaster recovery, business continuity, backup, and infrastructure resilience strategies.
• Establish technical operations policies covering deployment, access management, system reliability, change management, and operational risk.
• Coordinate production releases and infrastructure changes across multiple technical teams.
• Evaluate infrastructure capacity and proactively plan for network, compute, storage, bandwidth, and service growth.
• Work with Security teams to identify and mitigate operational and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
• Collaborate with Protocol and Engineering teams on operational implications of protocol upgrades and major releases.
• Support technical onboarding and operational readiness for AVSs, operators, infrastructure partners, and ecosystem participants.
• Develop operational playbooks and technical runbooks for critical systems.
• Establish clear ownership models and escalation paths across engineering and technical operations teams.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive operational processes and reduce manual intervention.
• Evaluate infrastructure vendors, cloud services, monitoring platforms, and other technology partners.
• Manage external infrastructure and service providers where appropriate.
• Build and lead a high-performing Technical Operations, SRE, and Infrastructure Operations organization.
• Establish team objectives, performance metrics, hiring plans, and professional development programs.
• Provide executive leadership with regular reporting on infrastructure health, operational risks, incidents, capacity, and strategic priorities.

Technical Operations AreasInfrastructure Reliability

• Production infrastructure
• Distributed systems
• Cloud infrastructure
• Kubernetes and containerized environments
• Networking
• Compute and storage
• High-availability architecture
• Capacity planning

Blockchain Operations

• Ethereum infrastructure
• Validator and node operations
• AVS infrastructure
• Operator environments
• Protocol upgrades
• Smart contract deployment coordination
• Blockchain monitoring
• Network health and performance

Site Reliability and Observability

• SRE practices
• Monitoring and alerting
• Logging
• Distributed tracing
• Performance monitoring
• Availability management
• Error budgets
• Capacity planning

Incident Management

• Production incident response
• Incident command
• Escalation management
• Root-cause analysis
• Postmortems
• Corrective action tracking
• Disaster recovery
• Business continuity

Ecosystem Operations

The Director will work closely with the broader EigenLayer ecosystem to improve technical readiness and operational coordination.

Responsibilities include:

• Supporting AVS technical onboarding.
• Establishing infrastructure readiness standards for ecosystem participants.
• Developing operational documentation and technical runbooks.
• Coordinating with node operators and infrastructure providers.
• Supporting ecosystem-wide incident response when appropriate.
• Establishing technical best practices for operators and service providers.
• Partnering with Developer Relations and Solutions Engineering on technical enablement.

Key Performance Indicators

The Director will establish and monitor metrics including:

• System availability
• Service reliability
• SLO and SLI attainment
• Mean Time to Detection (MTTD)
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)
• Incident frequency
• Production change failure rate
• Infrastructure utilization
• Deployment frequency
• Operational automation rate
• Capacity utilization
• Infrastructure cost efficiency
• Security and operational risk exposure
• AVS onboarding readiness
• Ecosystem technical support performance

Cross-Functional Leadership

This role will collaborate closely with:

• Protocol Engineering
• Infrastructure Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering
• Security
• Product
• Developer Relations
• Solutions Engineering
• Ecosystem
• Research
• Finance
• Legal
• Executive Leadership
• External Infrastructure Providers
• Node Operators
• AVS Developers

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience in technical operations, infrastructure engineering, SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or related fields.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical or infrastructure teams.
• Demonstrated experience operating large-scale, distributed, or mission-critical systems.
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, networking, distributed systems, and production operations.
• Proven experience building SRE, DevOps, or technical operations processes.
• Experience leading major incident response and production reliability programs.
• Strong understanding of observability, monitoring, alerting, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience developing operational standards, runbooks, and incident-management processes.
• Strong project management and organizational leadership skills.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to work effectively with highly technical teams.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, remote-first technology organization.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in blockchain, Web3, Ethereum, DeFi, or decentralized infrastructure.
• Experience operating Ethereum nodes, validators, or blockchain infrastructure.
• Experience with AVSs, restaking, or distributed validation networks.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, or comparable infrastructure technologies.
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or comparable observability platforms.
• Experience with Go, Rust, Python, or other systems-oriented programming languages.
• Experience managing infrastructure across multiple geographic regions.
• Experience with zero-downtime deployments and high-availability systems.
• Experience building technical operations organizations in an early-stage or high-growth environment.
• Experience working with decentralized or permissionless infrastructure networks.

Leadership Profile

The successful candidate will be:

• Operationally Rigorous: Builds reliable processes and establishes measurable performance standards.
• Technically Credible: Able to engage deeply with engineers and infrastructure specialists.
• Calm Under Pressure: Effective during high-severity incidents and rapidly changing conditions.
• Strategic: Connects infrastructure decisions with long-term protocol and ecosystem objectives.
• Automation-Minded: Continuously identifies opportunities to eliminate manual operational work.
• Collaborative: Works effectively across engineering, product, security, and ecosystem teams.
• Security-Conscious: Understands the operational risks associated with decentralized financial infrastructure.
• Builder-Oriented: Comfortable creating processes, systems, and teams in an evolving technical environment.

What We Offer

• Competitive Director-level compensation package.
• Equity and token-related compensation opportunities, where applicable.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Remote-first work environment within the United States.
• Opportunity to work at the intersection of Ethereum, distributed systems, and decentralized infrastructure.
• Collaboration with engineers, researchers, protocol developers, and Web3 infrastructure leaders.
• High visibility and direct exposure to executive leadership.
• Professional development and technical leadership opportunities.
• Opportunity to help build infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized applications and verifiable services.

Equal Opportunity Employer

• Eigen Labs is committed to building an inclusive and diverse workplace. Employment decisions are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.