Blockstream is hiring a Platform Architect in Engineering — Menlo Park. The overview below is synthesized from the employer posting on jobs.ashbyhq.com: factual requirements and scope are preserved, but prose is rewritten with editorial context. Verify details and apply via the employer link.
Blockstream was founded in 2014 by Dr. Adam Back and a group of fellow cryptographers and engineers who are passionate about Bitcoin and its potential to change the world.
Blockstream is seeking a Platform Architect to define and evolve the architectural foundation of our core platforms. This role is responsible for end-to-end system design, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and developer efficiency across Blockstream’s infrastructure and product ecosystem.
You will work closely with engineering, security, product, and leadership to design distributed systems that support high-value financial use cases, while upholding Bitcoin’s core principles of decentralization and trust minimization.
What You’ll Be Doing (Responsibilities)
Day-to-day scope for the Platform Architect as described in the posting:
- Own the architecture and technical vision for Blockstream’s platform and shared services
- Design scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant distributed systems supporting Bitcoin, Layer-2, and enterprise products
- Define platform standards for APIs, data models, service boundaries, and infrastructure patterns
- Partner with engineering teams to guide implementation, review designs, and resolve complex technical challenges
- Collaborate with Security and Infrastructure teams to ensure defense-in-depth, key management, and operational resilience
- Evaluate and introduce new technologies while balancing innovation with operational maturity
- Ensure platform designs support regulatory, enterprise, and institutional requirements without compromising decentralization principles
- Document architectural decisions, tradeoffs, and long-term technical roadmaps
- Mentor senior engineers and help raise the overall architectural rigor across teams
What We Look For in You (Required Qualifications)
Experience and skills the team lists as required:
- 5+ years of experience designing and operating large-scale platforms or infrastructure systems
- 6-8 years of development experience building production-grade backend with strong security boundaries, authentication, authorization, key management, as well as designing APIs, data models, and distributed services that run reliably at scale.
- Proven experience as a Platform Architect, Principal Engineer, or Senior Systems Architect
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, including consensus, fault tolerance, replication, and networking
- Strong experience with cloud and/or hybrid infrastructure (AWS, GCP, bare metal, Kubernetes, Terraform, etc.)
- Expertise in security-critical systems, including authentication, authorization, cryptography, and key management
- Experience designing high-availability systems for financial or mission-critical applications
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders
- Comfort working in a remote, globally distributed team
Nice to Have (Preferred Qualifications):
- Hands-on experience with Bitcoin, Lightning, Liquid, or blockchain infrastructure
- Experience contributing to open-source projects
- Familiarity with HSMs, secure enclaves, or hardware-backed key storage
- Background in fintech, capital markets, or institutional financial systems
- Experience balancing enterprise requirements with decentralized architectures
🔒 Stay Safe from Job Scams
All official Blockstream communication will come from an @blockstream.com email address. We will never ask you to share sensitive information or purchase equipment during the hiring process.
Build a standout application
For the Platform Architect at Blockstream, reviewers look for concise evidence over buzzwords. Mirror the language of the posting sparingly, quantify support or delivery outcomes, and show how you handled ambiguity, time-zone collaboration and user empathy. Keep your resume to impact, keep your cover note to one page, and link to artifacts — tickets resolved, docs shipped, dashboards owned — that prove you can operate in a fast-moving Web3 team. Prepare to discuss a time you turned a confusing user report into a clear fix and how you measure quality in support and operations.
Web3 hiring values reliability: on-time follow-through, clear writing, and a track record of improving runbooks and tooling. Treat the application as a work sample. For interviews, be ready to walk through how you prioritize across time zones, handle a difficult user, and decide when to escalate versus resolve directly. Show how you document decisions so the next teammate benefits.
In a distributed Web3 org, trust builds through written clarity. Use the cover note to demonstrate it.