Senior Backend Engineer - Solana Mobile

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Solana Labs, you own core backend services for Solana Mobile, the platform for digital assets on Solana. You join a lean, high-agency team that recently launched Seeker, a digital asset-first phone with hardware-backed wallet security, alongside the dApp Store and Solana Mobile Stack. Your systems power the dApp Store, wallet services, event tracking, on-chain transaction systems like staking, and the APIs that developers and users rely on daily.

What you'll do

• Design and own backend architecture for core Solana Mobile services: dApp Store APIs, wallet services backend, device registry, event tracking, and on-chain activity systems including staking infrastructure
• Build and maintain REST and WebSocket APIs consumed by Android, Flutter, and Web clients, as well as third-party developers integrating the Solana Mobile Stack
• Own your services in production: participate in on-call rotation, author runbooks, contribute to post-mortems, and drive resolution on action items
• Identify friction in your own work and team processes, automating what makes sense and building small tools that save repeated effort
• Contribute to CI/CD reliability and build infrastructure using GitHub Actions and WarpBuild, with attention to pipeline speed, cost, and reproducibility
• Conduct thorough code reviews, contribute to technical discussions, initiate RFC discussions for significant changes, and help the team improve over time
• Drive infrastructure decisions on AWS (ECS, RDS, Lambda, SQS, CloudFront) from architecture through cost-conscious production operation
• Own the observability stack: structured logging with Loki, metrics and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana Unified Alerting, distributed tracing, and incident response runbooks
• Contribute to backend architecture for device attestation and Seed Vault integration, including on-chain verification flows using Squads Protocol multisig and SPL token operations
• Collaborate with mobile engineers (Android/Kotlin, Flutter/Dart) to design mobile-first API patterns, including offline resilience, background sync, and efficient payloads for constrained networks
• Work closely with Protocol Engineers building Solana programs to design off-chain services that compose cleanly with on-chain logic

What you bring

• 5+ years of professional backend engineering with a track record of owning and operating production services
• High ownership: you take problems end-to-end and drive them to resolution without waiting for direction
• Proactive mindset: you identify issues early, propose solutions, and move quickly
• Active use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as part of your daily workflow, not as a novelty
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js and/or Rust, writing idiomatic, well-tested, production-grade code
• Solid command of PostgreSQL: schema design, query optimization, indexing, and migration discipline
• Good working knowledge of Redis: caching patterns, pub/sub, and TTL strategies
• Hands-on AWS experience (ECS, RDS, SQS, S3, Lambda), comfortable deploying and operating services in a cloud environment
• Sound understanding of distributed systems: idempotency, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation
• Security-aware approach to secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager/SSM), API auth patterns (JWT, OAuth2), and OWASP hygiene
• Comfort with Docker and containerized deployments

Nice to have

• Familiarity with the Solana ecosystem: RPC node interaction, on-chain program invocation, SPL tokens, wallet adapter patterns, or indexer design
• Experience working closely with external developers or ecosystem partners: debugging integrations, reviewing SDK usage, or shaping APIs based on real developer feedback
• Track record building small automation scripts, internal tooling, or LLM-integrated workflows that saved real time for yourself or your team
• Experience building backends for mobile-native products such as push notifications, storefront APIs, device attestation, or background job orchestration
• Contributions to open-source backend libraries, developer tooling, or the Solana ecosystem
• Prior experience in a senior or tech lead capacity: driving cross-team alignment, writing technical specs, and owning a domain end-to-end

About Solana Labs

Solana Labs is a technology company building products, tools, and reference implementations for the Solana blockchain, a high-performance blockchain delivering a fast and friendly user experience without sacrificing security.