Staff Platform Engineer at OpenSea | Web3 + AI in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Career Level & Compensation: "Staff Engineer" is a senior individual contributor track (typically L6+ equivalent). The $190k–$345k USD range is competitive and spans multiple internal levels, meaning strong candidates may land at the higher end. EU candidates at €150k–€270k equivalent are above-market for most European tech hubs except London and Zurich.
Skills You'll Build: This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering, AI tooling, and Web3 infrastructure — a rare and highly marketable combination. Specific skills developed include:
- Large-scale distributed systems on modern cloud (likely AWS/GCP)
- AI-augmented engineering workflows and CI/CD automation
- Observability and reliability engineering at crypto-scale
- Kotlin/JVM backend platform architecture
Culture Signals: OpenSea emphasizes extreme ownership in small teams and AI-native workflows — strong green flags for engineers who want high autonomy. The company is post-growth-phase in NFTs but pivoting toward a broader onchain economy play, suggesting interesting strategic challenges ahead. Equity upside exists but is harder to assess given the crypto market cycle.
Green Flags: Generous health coverage (100%), flexible PTO, meaningful parental leave (16–24 weeks), and mental health benefits signal genuine investment in employee wellbeing. The explicit encouragement to apply even without meeting every requirement suggests an inclusive hiring bar.
Red Flags to Watch: Small-team, high-ownership models can mean wearing many hats; confirm team size and on-call expectations before accepting.
OpenSea is building the gateway to the onchain economy — a rich world of communities, assets & creative expression uniquely possible with native digital ownership. Our products support millions of users and have helped shape onchain markets that exist today, and we're just getting started.
Our goal is to build the highest-leverage, most AI-native team in crypto (and ideally beyond). We believe that a small team — broken into even smaller teams with extreme ownership — can accomplish enormous results with the right people, the right tools, and the right company-wide investments in AI. We are building that team.
We're looking for a highly skilled, curious, and self-driven Staff Platform Engineer to help build the technical foundations that power OpenSea. In this role, you'll design and evolve the platform, services, and infrastructure that enable our engineering teams to build, deploy, and operate products quickly, reliably, and at scale. You'll partner closely with product engineers to improve developer experience, system performance, and operational excellence while helping evolve the AI-enabled workflows, engineering systems, and technical foundations that make our entire team more effective builders.
Responsibilities
In the age of AI, Platform teams have two main roles: architect, build, and maintain critical systems, and enable the rest of the team to work safely and productively across your areas of ownership. Our goal is to make the systems protect themselves and enable everyone to build quickly.
- Design, build, and evolve the platform services, infrastructure, and internal tooling that power OpenSea's products
- Own complex technical systems from definition through implementation, balancing scalability, reliability, maintainability, and developer experience
- Bring best-in-class observability, monitoring, and alerting to all systems at OpenSea
- Maintain and improve AI skills & tools to make systems more accessible, introspectable, and easy to contribute to
- Accelerate and expand CI coverage to improve correctness and AI verifiability
- Partner closely with product teams to accelerate build & deployment of critical products
- Build and ship high-quality, reliable software leveraging AI, modern development tools, and strong engineering judgment
Requirements
- 7+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale backend or platform systems
- Strong fluency in JVM languages such as Kotlin or Java
- Experience designing and operating distributed systems, backend services, and modern cloud infrastructure
- Strong understanding of platform engineering principles, developer tooling, CI/CD, observability, and operational best practices
- Demonstrated ability to own complex, ambiguous technical problems and deliver thoughtful, scalable solutions
- Excitement for making independent technical decisions balancing reliability, scalability, performance, and long-term maintainability
- Experience leveraging AI tools and workflows to improve engineering quality, efficiency, and team effectiveness
- Passion for Web3, digital ownership, AI, or other emerging technologies
The base salary for this full-time position, spanning multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges from $190,000 to $345,000 USD for candidates based in the United States and $161,500 to $293,250 USD for candidates based in the European Union, plus benefits & equity. Compensation for candidates based outside of the US and EU will vary to reflect local market conditions.
If you don't think you meet all of the criteria above but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone who is excited to join the team.
Benefits & Perks
- Health Benefits: 100% coverage for Dental/Vision/Medical for employees and 90% for dependents
- Flexible Time Off: Flexible policy aimed at letting employees take as much time off as they'd like to refresh, so long as it doesn't interfere with goals and company velocity
- Parental Leave: 16 weeks of paid parental bonding, plus up to 8 additional weeks for the birthing parent
- Mental Health: Access to Spring Health — 8 therapy & 8 coaching sessions per year
- 11 Company Holidays
- Fidelity 401(k) Plan
- Internet/Mobile Reimbursement Plan
- Reimbursement or Monthly Snack Delivery
- ✈ Company & Team retreats for fun and collaboration
- ☕ Team Member Co-Working and Gathering Expense
- MacBook Pro & WFH Stipend to set you up for success
- Weekly $50 Uber Eats credit
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Frequently Asked Questions
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