Head of Node Operations for blockchain nodes, remote across Europe

What a Head of Node Operations does

A Head of Node Operations runs a company’s blockchain nodes and the team behind them: validators, RPC nodes or oracle nodes, in the cloud and on bare metal. Job ads ask for node fleets that are deployed and monitored across several cloud providers and bare metal servers, with alerts and incident response. The tasks I list on Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations add two more: evaluating how the nodes of different protocols work, and training colleagues.

From January 2022 I held this job at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, a node operator in the Chainlink oracle network with nodes for protocols such as Ethereum and Avalanche.

A runbook outline for a node fleet with failover

This is how I would structure the runbook of a node fleet. It draws on the takeover and the cloud migration described on Node operations and a cloud migration with failover.

Part	What it holds
Inventory	Each node with its protocol, its role, its data center or cloud, and the person responsible
Setup documentation	How each node is set up, started, updated and recovered
Monitoring	Log evaluation and a notification when a node falls behind or fails, in place before the first change
Performance	Response times and sync state per node, measured before and after tuning
Second site	A failover site in another cloud or data center, tested with a planned switch
Migration	Moves in steps, with the old site as fallback until the new one carries the load
On-call and training	Who answers which alert, and how a new colleague learns the setup

In 2022 I took over the operation together with the internal documentation, so the documentation row is where I would start in your company too.

My node work, newest first

• I’m still running blockchain nodes today.
• Since April 2026: AI harnesses across the full stack, for infrastructure, code and data, in a client’s platform transformation.
• 2022 to October 2024: at Blocksize Capital, Head of Decentralized Finance and Node Operations from January 2022, then Chief Information Officer. I took over the nodes in several data centers, built the node operations team and later moved the infrastructure from Azure to another cloud with failover. As CIO I coordinated the infrastructure team with development, product and sales.
• 2018 to 2021: AWS infrastructure for an insurance platform at Policen Direkt, in the regions Frankfurt and London.
• Earlier: a community platform on load-balanced servers I set up myself, and servers, switches and firewalls I installed in data centers.

Profile at a glance

Role	Head of Node Operations, blockchain node operator, infrastructure lead
Engagement	Permanent, remote for the most part, on-site days in Frankfurt Rhine-Main; interim
Location	Frankfurt, Germany; remote for companies across Europe
Nodes	Chainlink oracle nodes; Ethereum and Avalanche; blockchain nodes of my own since 2015
Cloud	AWS Solutions Architect Associate, AWS since 2018; Azure and Google Cloud until October 2024
Servers	Debian and Ubuntu since 2007, Docker since 2019, hardware in data centers in Germany and the United States
Languages	German, English

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke. I have worked in IT and media for more than twenty years, and servers were part of it early: in 1996 I did service work on HP, Sun and Oracle systems for banks. I build software with Claude and Codex and am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. The monitoring and data center work of later years is listed on Realized projects.