Senior DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer

Category Labs (formerly known as Monad Labs) is a team of systems engineers and researchers on a mission to design and build at the frontier of decentralized technology. We strive to deliver significant improvements over existing blockchain solutions. After raising $225M in series A funding, led by Paradigm, we are growing our team.

We’re the team behind Monad, a high-performance, EVM-compatible Layer 1 whose public mainnet is now live. We write the core software that runs it: a parallel-execution EVM, a custom state database, and a BFT consensus client, all developed in the open.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer to operate the infrastructure behind Monad, and to push how much of that operation can be driven by AI. You'll keep our globally-distributed validator, full node, and archive fleet healthy across mainnet and testnet, own our infrastructure-as-code and observability, and build the agentic tooling and guardrails that let a small team safely operate a large fleet. As more of our engineering shifts toward AI, this role is central to designing the workflows, deterministic guardrails, and security perimeters within which autonomous agents operate our infrastructure; you'll also help stand up and operate the infrastructure behind our own growing model workloads.

What You'll Do

• Operate the Monad node fleet: health, sync, upgrades, and recovery across validators, full nodes, archive/historical, and indexer nodes on mainnet and testnet, including safe, staged rollouts and incident response.

• Own our infrastructure-as-code: Ansible for fleet configuration, Terraform + Atlantis for cloud and DNS, and Kubernetes/Flux (GitOps) for platform services.

• Build and operate observability and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki); create dashboards and alerts that catch problems before they page while minimizing false positives.

• Automate the release pipeline: node upgrades, canary rollouts, snapshot/restore, and the guardrails that bound blast radius (e.g., protecting validators from automated changes).

• Design and build agentic operations: develop AI agents, tooling (e.g., MCP servers), and runbooks-as-code that let agents safely investigate, diagnose, and execute routine operations, with deterministic guardrails and human oversight.

• Codify operational knowledge into tools and automation that the whole team, and its agents, can reuse.

• Harden nodes and services, manage secrets, and continuously drive down manual toil.

Who You Are

• You have 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering, operating production systems at scale.

• You have strong Linux, systemd, networking, and shell fundamentals, and you're comfortable debugging live systems over SSH.

• You have deep, hands-on infrastructure-as-code experience with Ansible and Terraform.

• You have experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, or equivalents).

• You have hands-on fluency with AI-assisted engineering: you use coding agents and LLM tooling in your daily workflow and have judgment on where it helps and where it's risky.

• You have experience designing automation with safe guardrails, and you bring calm, methodical incident response.

• You have programming and scripting experience (e.g., Python, bash).

• Experience with Kubernetes and GitOps (Flux or Argo) is a plus.

• Experience building AI agent tooling, MCP servers, or agent orchestration frameworks is a plus.

• Experience serving inference, either locally or as a service is a plus.

• Previous experience with blockchain clients or node operations is a plus.

• A Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is a plus.

Why Work with Us

• Challenging problems: You’ll work on extremely challenging problems with massive impact. See our Blogs and Publications & Talks for a flavor of the problems we are solving in the real world.

• Huge opportunity: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) standard is ubiquitous, but existing EVM-compati