Preparing for your VP Infrastructure interview

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 (45m)

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.

• Advisor (45m)

Dialogue with an external advisor on leadership, team-building, and scaling organizations.

• ‍Web3 Bar Raiser (45m) - Case-by-Case Basis

Explores your fluency in the Web3 ecosystem—concepts, trends, and hands-on experience.

Take-Home Project + Presentation

Scoped project to complete within 7 days, followed by a 45-minute team presentation.

Alignment Interview (90m)

Conversation with a senior leader outside the team for a broader perspective on fit.

Final Call with Sergey (45m)

Deep dive on skills, leadership, and mutual fit at the highest level.

Closing

References, background check, and final recruiter check-in.

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VP, Infrastructure

About the Role

We're hiring a Head of Infrastructure to scale and lead one of the most mission-critical teams at Chainlink Labs. This is not a legacy maintainer role—it's a rare opportunity to architect, harden, and evolve the core systems that power decentralized services relied upon by the most advanced users in the world.

You’ll lead a team of 50+ engineers across distributed systems, internal platforms, and production operations. The ideal candidate brings a strong track record of delivering reliable, cost-efficient infra at scale and has lived the challenges of balancing velocity, availability, and cost in high-growth environments. You’ve enforced maturity in the SDLC without slowing down the business—and you’ve seen how internal platform quality can unlock or bottleneck the entire company.

If you’ve ever said, “Infra should be a force multiplier, not a gatekeeper,” you’re thinking like we do.

Your Impact

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• Build world-class infra team: Attract, retain, and grow the infra team by hiring the best people in the most relevant roles, past experience managing a team of 50+ engineers
• Reliability and cost management track record: Have successfully delivered and supported multi-product mission-critical online services and maintained highly available mature deployments for > 3 years (not just new product delivery). Has past operational and cost management experience with handling critical incidents involving complex distributed systems. 
• Own release process across the entire pipeline: Be able to enforce processes in development, deployment, release and automation of the SDLC in all aspects (code + operations).
• Internal customer obsessed, focused on the velocity and enablement of the business via mature and stable platform solutions.

Requirements

• Experience building, leading, and managing a team of 50+.
• Technical experience: Engineering competency to design and evaluate distributed systems architecture from front-ends to load balancers, databases, caching, logging and monitoring services while embracing infrastructure as code.
• Experience owning and driving cost reduction, cost management for the entire engineering organization.
• Have worked on and enhanced internal development experience across complex product suit
• Startup experience: Have startup experience of their own or & worked with founders in high-growth >Series B companies. Strong operational skills for achieving success in a hyper-growth environment. Able to assess risk, balance speed and quality in a pragmatic fashion. 
• Blockchain commitment: Commitment to work in the blockchain industry for 5+ years. E.g. Owns cryptocurrency, uses DeFi, has a thesis for why blockchains matter, etc

Preferred Qualifications

• Developer productivity experience
• Data pipeline experience (Big Query, DataFlow, Cloud Composer, Pentaho, DataProc, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka or similar services)
• Worked in infra / PaaS companies and have led teams that offered an on-prem release process

Why This Role?

This is an opportunity to define what world-class infrastructure looks like in the most frontier part of the internet. At Chainlink Labs, we operate on the edge of what’s possible in decentralized systems. That means infra isn’t a behind-the-scenes function—it’s foundational to our speed, our reliability, and our ability to ship with conviction in an unforgiving environment.

You won’t just inherit complexity—you’ll simplify it. You won’t just react to incidents—you’ll prevent them out. You won’t just support developers—you’ll accelerate them. And you’ll do it with a team that values performance, ownership, and depth over theater.

If you're a builder at heart who’s led through scale, knows how to design for chaos, and is ready to help shape the infrastructure backbone of the next internet, this is your role.

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