Welcome to the Chainlink Labs hiring process. Our interviews are fast, focused, and reciprocal—all held on Zoom to ensure speed and flexibility—giving you direct access to the leaders you’ll partner with. The process is tailored to your role and may evolve; we’ll keep you informed.
What to expect
Intro Call (30m)
Conversation with the recruiter of this role on your background, the role scope, and how our principles guide how we build.
Hiring Manager (30m)
Deep dive into your career trajectory, leadership philosophy, and alignment with team goals.
Team Interviews
Quick sessions with team members on your experience, industry knowledge, and project work.
Stakeholders (45m each)
Discussions with leaders you’ll collaborate with on Web3 expertise and leadership approach.
System Design Interview (60 minutes):
The scope of the discussion will involve building an app and integrating it with various systems from the ground up, while covering web3 fundamentals. The aim of this interview is to assess your capabilities in System Design in a web3 environment, understand how you think about tradeoffs, solutions to complex problems, and determine requirements. We'll be using a whiteboard tool to model the system architecture.
Web3 Bar Raiser (45m) - Case-by-Case Basis
Explores your fluency in the Web3 ecosystem—concepts, trends, and hands-on experience.
Alignment Interview (90m)
Conversation with a senior leader outside the team for a broader perspective on fit.
Take-Home Project + Presentation
Scoped project to complete within 7 days, followed by a 45-minute team presentation.
Final Meeting with Hiring Manager (30m)
In depth discussion of technical leadership capabilities, long term career trajectory, and strategic alignment at leadership level
Final Meeting with Chief Executive Officer (30m)
High Level conversation focused on leadership perspective, market understanding and overall organizational fit
Closing
References, background check, and final recruiter check-in.
Job description
VP, Engineering, Data and CCIP
About the role
Chainlink is seeking a VP of Engineering to lead our Data Products and CCIP, responsible for scaling critical infrastructure that underpins decentralized finance and cross-chain interoperability. This role exists to drive organizational and technical excellence across high-stakes, high-availability systems while enabling rapid growth and evolution of the engineering organization.
You will operate at both strategic and hands-on levels, shaping system architecture, elevating engineering standards, and ensuring the reliability and performance of systems that secure significant onchain value.
Your Impact
- Scale and evolve a high-performing engineering organization, maintaining a high talent bar while adapting team structure to support rapid growth and changing priorities
- Define and drive architecture for mission-critical systems powering data delivery and cross-chain communication with strict uptime and reliability requirements
- Establish engineering standards and practices that elevate system design quality, operational rigor, and long-term maintainability across teams
- Ensure resilient, fault-tolerant infrastructure capable of operating in adversarial and financially sensitive environments
- Influence company-wide technical direction through hands-on contributions, design leadership, and cross-functional alignment
- Represent engineering in high-stakes internal and external contexts, shaping product and infrastructure strategy
Requirements
- Scaled an engineering organization of 50+ engineers through periods of growth and change, including restructuring teams and making high-velocity hiring and performance management decisions
- Owned production systems with 99.99%+ uptime requirements in adversarial or financially consequential environments, including direct accountability for incident response and root cause analysis
- Made high-impact architectural decisions under real-world constraints and elevated engineering standards across teams beyond direct reporting lines
- Demonstrated deep technical fluency in distributed data systems, including tradeoffs across latency, reliability, and data delivery guarantees in real-time or near-real-time environments
- Clear, informed conviction in blockchain technology, supported by hands-on engagement with crypto ecosystems and the ability to articulate a perspective on its importance
Preferred Requirements
- Experience operating at an executive level, representing engineering in customer-facing or leadership settings while driving urgency and raising performance standards
- Worked closely with founders in high-growth, post-Series B environments, contributing to operational scaling in rapidly evolving organizations
How to approach the conversation
Clarity matters
Answer directly and with focus. Precision is valued more than polish.
Depth over script
We’re interested in how you think and lead, not rehearsed examples. Expect the conversation to stretch into follow-ups.
Think out loud
Share your reasoning and trade-offs. The process is as important as the conclusion.
Dialogue, not Q&A
Come ready with questions about priorities, culture, and operating principles. We want to ensure alignment is mutual.
Before we meet
Explore who we are and how we build with the curated resources below and on our resources page, providing context for a thoughtful discussion.
Keynotes, case studies, and recent press about Chainlink:
Get a deeper understanding of the Chainlink platform and how it powers the verifiable web:
Why join us?
Our mission
Build decentralized systems that link everything to the truth, creating a fair, unbiased world.
Why join us?
Work with an A-team of industry experts, driving Chainlink’s growth at the forefront of blockchain. Boldness is essential here.
Key Principles alignment
We are proud of our collaborative culture. Be prepared to discuss how you align with our Key Principles:
Ownership
We apply high standards in our work and take complete, unconditional responsibility for all outcomes. We always go the extra mile when helping one another, our users, and our community and working toward achieving our objectives.
Focus
Prioritizing outcomes and avoiding the many distractions in our industry enables us to pay full attention to our objectives and achieve more in less time without wasting energy.
Dialogue
Chainlink Labs is an idea meritocracy. We seek to arrive at the truth about every situation through open, honest, and constructive dialogue. We avoid personal biases and ego and seek to overcome the fear of engaging in productive conflict to arrive at truth.