Software Engineer, Storage

As a Software Engineer specializing in storage at Anza, you will play a critical role in fortifying the Agave client and the broader Solana network. The AccountsDB team owns the custom storage engine at the heart of every Solana validator. Every account on Solana, from balances to program state to token holdings, lives in AccountsDB, and every transaction the network processes reads from and writes to it. Your work will directly contribute to the performance and reliability of blockchain infrastructure, ensuring account state is stored, indexed, and served efficiently as the network grows.

What you'll do

• Design, implement, and optimize AccountsDB's core storage paths, including account file layout, the account index, and the read and write caching layers, to improve throughput and latency across the validator
• Lower memory and disk requirements as account state continues to grow, to keep validator hardware requirements in check
• Improve the flushing, cleaning, shrinking, and purging processes to reduce write amplification and keep resource usage predictable under sustained load
• Optimize snapshot generation, loading, and index generation to shorten validator startup and catch-up times
• Ensure account state remains correct across forks, rooting, and crash recovery, where bugs can have network-wide consequences
• Create and execute comprehensive tests to validate the reliability and efficiency of the storage engine, including stress tests, fault injection, and performance benchmarking
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including runtime, block production, and core protocol engineers, as well as other Solana client teams, to ensure seamless integration of storage components across the validator
• Maintain thorough documentation of AccountsDB design and behavior and conduct peer code reviews to uphold high standards of code quality and consistency

What you bring

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or relevant practical experience, alongside 3+ years architecting data stores, file systems, databases, or high-throughput storage systems
• Mastery of Rust, C, or C++
• Comprehensive knowledge of low-level storage mechanics, including memory-mapped files, page caching, index structures, on-disk formats, and garbage collection mechanisms
• Advanced knowledge of kernel-level and hardware I/O pipelines, NVMe constraints, buffered versus direct I/O, and modern async interfaces like io_uring
• Strong understanding of custom memory allocators and Linux kernel scheduling, page management, and I/O handling under intense throughput
• Proven experience building concurrent systems, featuring deep knowledge of lock overhead, lock-free structures, and hardware memory models
• A track record of profiling and tuning low-level code with emphasis on hardware mechanics, memory bus saturation, and CPU cache efficiency
• Ability to debug intricate software architectures, isolate performance bottlenecks, and execute robust engineering solutions
• Exceptional communication skills and a team-first mindset for working alongside technical peers in an open environment

Nice to have

• Experience with LSM trees, B-trees, or hash-based storage engines such as RocksDB, LevelDB, or WiredTiger
• Background in versioned or multi-version data stores, snapshotting systems, or blockchain state storage
• Familiarity with Linux and systems automation tools
• Active participation in Bitcoin, Ethereum, blockchain projects, or the open-source community

About Anza

Anza is the core engineering team behind Solana, the leading high-performance network powering internet capital markets, payments, and crypto applications. Founded by the engineers who built the original Solana validator client, Anza develops Agave, the network's primary and most widely run validator client, and ships the software that pushes the boundaries of blockchain performance and scale. Most recently, Anza built and shipped Alpenglow, the biggest upgrade in Solana's history, which replaced the network's original consensus protocol and brought deterministic finality in about 150ms to mainnet-beta.