Platform Engineering Lead

About Morpho

Morpho is a leading Decentralized Finance (DeFi) lending protocol backed by a16z crypto, Paradigm, Ribbit Capital, Apollo, Vaneck, Coinbase Ventures, Variant and 50 others to build an open credit network giving anyone, anywhere, access to the best possible terms. Morpho is experiencing exponential adoption, with over 1 billion in deposits on the network and used by institutional clients including Bitwise, Galaxy, and Anchorage Digital and the largest crypto exchanges, such as Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken. Now, Morpho is scaling its team of contributors to establish itself as the open credit network, not just of DeFi, but of the world.

Role

This role exists to build and lead Morpho's platform engineering team: own the infrastructure roadmap end-to-end, raise reliability to institutional standards, and grow the engineers behind it.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the platform engineering team, owning hiring, performance, and career growth to scale the team for a growing engineering org while holding a high technical and culture bar.

• Own the infrastructure roadmap and technical strategy, turning product and business needs into a prioritized backlog and documented architecture decisions that balance speed, cost, and reliability.

• Accelerate engineering velocity by driving self-service infrastructure, CI/CD optimization for the monorepo, and developer tooling that cuts deployment time to minutes.

• Raise the reliability and security bar with zero-trust IAM, observability across tier-1 services, proactive alerting, and blameless incident and post-mortem practices, working toward multi-region readiness and institutional-grade SLOs.

• Partner with product, protocol, and business teams to represent platform engineering in planning, translate infrastructure trade-offs into business impact, and keep the platform enabling rather than gating product delivery.

• Set the engineering culture by example through clear architecture docs, infrastructure-as-code standards, and mentorship that helps engineers grow and ship with confidence.

What Success Looks Like

First 30 days

Build deep context on Morpho's on-chain deployment patterns, core services, and infrastructure pain points. Publish an initial platform strategy and 90-day roadmap, start 1:1s with the team, and take over weekly incident reviews and architecture forums.

First 3 months

Have the platform team staffed against current priorities with a clear pipeline for open roles. Ship a self-service deployment pipeline with automated rollbacks for at least one tier-1 service, and stand up observability with proactive alerting and defined SLOs.

Must Have Skills & Experience

• 8+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, including 3+ years managing engineering teams.

• Track record building and scaling production infrastructure from startup to enterprise scale, owning reliability and developer-experience outcomes.

• Experience leading platform or infrastructure transformations that measurably improved developer velocity and reliability, with concrete metrics.

• Deep technical fluency in event-driven architectures, Kubernetes-based platforms, GitOps, and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred).

• Hands-on enough to review architecture, guide technical calls, and join incident response, while leading management-first.

• Strong cross-functional leadership: influences decisions across product, protocol, and business teams without direct authority.

• Comfort operating in fast-changing, ambiguous environments where the playbook doesn't exist yet.

• Clear, crisp async communication through RFCs, runbooks, and incident reviews.

• High ownership and autonomy with a team-first, low-ego mindset.

• Genuine curiosity about crypto and DeFi.