Who We Are 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 that can deliver a fast and friendly user experience, without sacrificing security. The Solana Foundation is working to realize a world where individuals own their data, use permissionless networks, and transfer information and value freely around the world. We are looking for talented people who are willing to jump right in and use their expertise to help the ecosystem build.
What We Do Frontier Traders is a community and rewards platform for elite firms and traders working at the frontier of emerging assets, markets, and technology. It brings trading activity from across the Solana ecosystem into one place, where traders earn rewards, compete in campaigns for prize pools, climb leaderboards, and progress through VIP tiers that unlock rebates and infrastructure access.
The product tracks spot and perpetuals volume across every venue on Solana, spanning RWAs, tokenized equities, and the long tail of ecosystem assets. Its users are demanding by nature: proprietary trading firms, market makers, and HFTs, alongside the onchain traders moving real volume every day. They notice when a number is wrong, and they expect the product to keep pace with the market.
The platform integrates with more than 25 ecosystem partners across DEXs, perpetuals venues, launchpads, wallets, and data infrastructure, including Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, Pump.fun, Phantom, Helius, and Pyth.
The Opportunity 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.
This is a role for an engineer who is genuinely talented at building products, not only at building systems. You will make the architecture calls and you will also argue about the user experience, because on a product like this the two are the same conversation. Volume attribution has to be correct, because rebates depend on it. Leaderboards have to update fast, because traders are watching them. Campaigns have to be resilient, because the people using this product are professionally good at finding edges.
You will work in a small team with unusual autonomy, directly alongside Foundation stakeholders and the trading firms who use the product. There is no existing playbook to inherit here. You will be expected to define the roadmap as much as execute it.
To Be Successful in This role
You will
- 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
You Ideally Have
- 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
Sourced from the a16z Speedrun talent network — apply on Speedrun.