[Hiring] Lead Engineer @Solana Foundation

Role Description

Solana Foundation is seeking a Lead Engineer to own Frontier Traders end to end, from the data pipelines that attribute trading activity across the ecosystem through to the interfaces traders open every day.

• Own the technical direction and delivery of Frontier Traders end to end, from onchain data ingestion through to the trader-facing product.
• Build and scale the pipelines that attribute spot and perpetuals volume across every venue on Solana, normalizing fills, wallets, and accounts into activity traders can trust.
• Design and operate the rewards engine behind campaigns, points, prize pools, and leaderboards, where correctness is a hard requirement rather than a goal.
• Build and maintain the VIP tier system, including rolling maker and taker volume windows, tier progression, and rebate calculation.
• Ship realtime experiences, including live activity feeds, leaderboards, and tier progression, that stay accurate and responsive under market load.
• Own integrations with ecosystem partners across DEXs, perps venues, launchpads, wallets, and data providers, and keep them working as those venues evolve.
• Work directly with traders, firms, and market makers to turn their feedback into shipped product.
• Set the engineering bar for the product: architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and incident response.
• Make pragmatic build-versus-integrate decisions that keep the team fast without accruing the kind of technical debt that erodes trust with a sophisticated user base.
• Partner closely with design, product, and the Foundation's Trading and Growth teams to shape what gets built and why.

Qualifications

• A track record of building and shipping products end to end, with clear personal ownership of what you built rather than a supporting role in someone else's system.
• Strong engineering fundamentals across the stack, and the judgment to know where the genuinely hard problems are.
• Technical proficiency in Rust and other performant programming languages.
• Experience with high-volume data pipelines, indexing, or realtime systems where both accuracy and latency matter.
• Experience building financial or transactional products where being wrong has real consequences.
• Working knowledge of Solana: accounts, transactions, program interactions, and how to get reliable data off the chain.
• Familiarity with DeFi market structure, including spot and perpetuals venues, AMMs and order books, maker and taker dynamics, and how fees and rebates actually work.
• Strong product instincts and a willingness to hold an opinion about the user experience.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity, limited process, and evolving priorities.
• Excellent communication, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and to work directly with demanding external users.

Bonus Points

• You have built for traders, market makers, or HFT firms, or you have worked at one.
• Experience with points, rewards, loyalty, or incentive systems at scale, including the adversarial side of designing them.
• Hands-on experience with Solana data infrastructure such as Helius, Pyth, Geyser plugins, or custom indexers.
• Open source contributions to Solana or DeFi tooling.
• You trade onchain yourself and have opinions about the products you use.