Lead Engineer for Frontier Traders at 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 that delivers fast and secure user experiences.

Frontier Traders is a community and rewards platform for elite firms and traders working at the frontier of emerging assets, markets, and technology. It aggregates trading activity across the Solana ecosystem, enabling traders to earn rewards, compete in campaigns, climb leaderboards, and access VIP tiers with rebates and infrastructure.

The platform tracks spot and perpetuals volume across venues like RWAs, tokenized equities, and ecosystem assets. Users include proprietary trading firms, market makers, HFTs, and onchain traders who demand accuracy and real-time responsiveness.

Frontier Traders integrates with over 25 ecosystem partners, including Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, Pump.fun, Phantom, Helius, and Pyth.

The Opportunity

The Solana Foundation is seeking a Lead Engineer to own Frontier Traders end-to-end, from onchain data ingestion to the trader-facing product.

This role requires an engineer who excels at building products—not just systems. You’ll make architectural decisions and advocate for user experience, as both are critical for this product. Volume attribution must be accurate for rebates, leaderboards must update in real-time, and campaigns must remain resilient against sophisticated users.

You’ll work in a small, autonomous team alongside Foundation stakeholders, the Torque team, and trading firms. There’s no existing playbook—you’ll define the roadmap and execute it.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and delivery of Frontier Traders, from onchain data ingestion to trader-facing interfaces.

• Build and scale data pipelines to attribute spot and perpetuals volume across Solana venues, ensuring normalized fills, wallets, and accounts for trusted activity.

• Design and operate the rewards engine for campaigns, points, prize pools, and leaderboards, where correctness is non-negotiable.

• Develop and maintain the VIP tier system, including rolling maker/taker volume windows, tier progression, and rebate calculations.

• Ship real-time experiences like live activity feeds, leaderboards, and tier progression, ensuring accuracy and responsiveness under market load.

• Own integrations with ecosystem partners across DEXs, perpetuals venues, launchpads, wallets, and data providers, ensuring they remain functional as venues evolve.

• Collaborate directly with traders, firms, and market makers to translate feedback into shipped product improvements.

• Set the engineering bar for the product, covering architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and incident response.

• Make pragmatic build-versus-integrate decisions to keep the team agile while avoiding technical debt that could erode trust.

• Partner closely with design, product, and Foundation teams to shape what gets built and why.

Ideal Candidate Qualifications

• Proven track record of building and shipping end-to-end products with clear ownership.

• Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to identify genuinely hard problems.

• Technical proficiency in Rust and other performant programming languages.

• Experience with high-volume data pipelines, indexing, or real-time systems where accuracy and latency matter.

• Background in building financial or transactional products where precision is critical.

• Working knowledge of Solana, including accounts, transactions, program interactions, and reliable offchain data extraction.

• Familiarity with DeFi market structures, including spot/perpetuals venues, AMMs, order books, maker/taker dynamics, and fee/rebate mechanics.

• Strong product instincts and a willingness to advocate for user experience.

• Comfort operating with ambiguity, limited process, and evolving priorities.

• Excellent communication skills, including explaining technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and collaborating with demanding external users.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience building for traders, market makers, or HFT firms, or prior work at such firms.

• Experience with points, rewards, loyalty, or incentive systems at scale, including adversarial design considerations.

• Hands-on experience with Solana data infrastructure like Helius, Pyth, Geyser plugins, or custom indexers.

• Open-source contributions to Solana or DeFi tooling.

• Personal experience trading onchain and opinions about the products used.