About the role
About Alpen Labs
Alpen Labs is building the infrastructure layer that expands what Bitcoin can do. We’re building Alpen to become Bitcoin’s financial system, enabling users and institutions to access financial services directly on Bitcoin. Founded by MIT alumni and based in New York, the company focuses on advancing Bitcoin through innovations in zero-knowledge cryptography, scalable Layer 2 systems, and trust-minimized programmable infrastructure.
We believe Bitcoin is entering a new phase where developers, institutions, and financial systems will build directly on top of it. Alpen enables this by adding financial services, privacy, and usability layers to Bitcoin, making it practical to use as money at a global scale.
Our team includes engineers and researchers from organizations such as Blockstream, Palantir, and Nethermind, as well as contributors to major open-source cryptography and blockchain projects.
Role Overview
As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you will lead the design, scalability, and reliability of Alpen’s core infrastructure. This role is ideal for someone who combines deep technical expertise with a strong sense of ownership and a DevOps mindset. You’ll play a critical role in ensuring our systems are highly available, observable, and resilient as we scale a global, distributed blockchain platform.
You’ll partner closely with engineering, security, and platform teams to drive reliability standards, lead infrastructure initiatives, and mentor other engineers.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain highly available, scalable infrastructure on AWS
- Lead Kubernetes architecture and operations for production-grade systems
- Own and evolve infrastructure as code using Terraform
- Design and maintain observability systems using Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki
- Define and implement SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets
- Lead incident response, postmortems, and reliability improvements
- Drive automation across deployments, scaling, and system management
- Improve CI/CD pipelines and release processes for speed and safety
- Champion DevOps best practices across engineering teams
- Lead complex infrastructure and reliability projects end-to-end
- Improve the on-call experience through clear alerting, strong documentation, and faster incident resolution
- Encourage teams to adopt a DevOps approach by empowering engineers to use infrastructure tools independently while elevating operational standards
- Collaborate effectively within a globally distributed team
What We’re Looking For
Must-Have Skills & Experience
- 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or related roles
- Deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform in production environments
- Strong hands-on experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, alerting systems)
- Proven ability to lead infrastructure or reliability-focused projects
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, networking, and Linux systems
- Experience working in globally distributed, async teams
- Based in the United States
Nice-to-Have (Bonus Points!)
- Experience with L1 and/or L2 blockchain infrastructure (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, ZkSync or similar)
- Familiarity with zero-knowledge systems or cryptographic infrastructure
- Experience supporting high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems
- Background working in startup or high-growth environments
What We Offer
What we extend to our new hires is an invitation to actively contribute to the evolution of cutting-edge technologies within the blockchain space. This presents a unique opportunity to innovate and devise creative solutions for complex engineering challenges. To support your journey, we commit to providing all the resources necessary for your learning, growth, and productivity.
Moreover, our compensation package is designed to mirror the passion, dedication, and hard work you invest in your role. We recognize and appreciate your contributions by aligning your exceptional commitment with generous compensation.