Lead Engineer, Frontier Traders

As Lead Engineer for Frontier Traders at the Solana Foundation, you own this community and rewards platform end to end. Frontier Traders brings trading activity from across the Solana ecosystem into one place, where elite firms, market makers, and traders earn rewards, compete in campaigns, climb leaderboards, and progress through VIP tiers. You will make the architecture calls and shape the user experience, because on a product serving demanding professional traders, the two are inseparable. There is no existing playbook to inherit; you will define the roadmap as much as execute it.

What you'll do

• 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
• 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, perpetuals venues, launchpads, wallets, and data providers including Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, Pump.fun, Phantom, Helius, and Pyth, 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, including architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and incident response
• Make pragmatic build-versus-integrate decisions that keep the team fast without accruing 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

What you bring

• 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 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 work directly with demanding external users

Nice to have

• 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

About Solana Foundation

The Solana Foundation is a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, dedicated to the adoption, decentralization, and security of the Solana network. Solana is a high-performance blockchain designed to deliver a fast and friendly user experience without sacrificing security, enabling individuals to own their data, use permissionless networks, and transfer information and value freely around the world.