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The Solana Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, is seeking a Lead Engineer to own Frontier Traders end-to-end. Frontier Traders is a community and rewards platform for elite trading firms, market makers, and HFTs working in the Solana ecosystem. The platform tracks spot and perpetuals volume across every venue on Solana, integrates with 25+ ecosystem partners (Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, Pump.fun, Phantom, Helius, Pyth), and provides traders with rewards, leaderboards, VIP tiers, and rebate access.
In this role, you will own the technical direction and delivery of the entire product, from onchain data ingestion through trader-facing interfaces. Key responsibilities include: building and scaling data pipelines that attribute spot and perpetuals volume across Solana venues with high accuracy; designing and operating the rewards engine for campaigns, points, prize pools, and leaderboards where correctness is critical; building and maintaining the VIP tier system with rolling volume windows and rebate calculations; shipping realtime experiences (activity feeds, leaderboards, tier progression) that remain accurate under market load; owning integrations with ecosystem partners and keeping them functional as venues evolve; working directly with traders and firms to translate feedback into shipped product; setting the engineering bar for architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and incident response; making pragmatic build-versus-integrate decisions; and partnering with design, product, and Foundation teams on roadmap and priorities.
This is a high-autonomy role in a small team with no existing playbook. You will define the roadmap as much as execute it. The product serves demanding users who notice when numbers are wrong and expect the platform to keep pace with fast-moving markets. Volume attribution directly impacts rebates, leaderboards must update in realtime, and campaigns must be resilient against sophisticated users finding edges.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Track record of building and shipping products end-to-end with clear personal ownership, not a supporting role
- Strong engineering fundamentals across the stack with judgment to identify genuinely hard problems
- Technical proficiency in Rust and other performant programming languages
- Experience with high-volume data pipelines, indexing, or realtime systems where accuracy and latency both matter
- Experience building financial or transactional products where correctness has real consequences
- Working knowledge of Solana: accounts, transactions, program interactions, and reliable onchain data retrieval
- Familiarity with DeFi market structure: spot and perpetuals venues, AMMs, order books, maker/taker dynamics, fees, and rebates
- Strong product instincts and willingness to hold opinions about user experience
- Comfort operating with ambiguity, limited process, and evolving priorities
- Excellent communication: ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders and work directly with demanding external users
BONUS:
- Experience building for traders, market makers, or HFT firms, or working at one
- Experience with points, rewards, loyalty, or incentive systems at scale, including adversarial design considerations
- Hands-on experience with Solana data infrastructure (Helius, Pyth, Geyser plugins, custom indexers)
- Open source contributions to Solana or DeFi tooling
- Personal onchain trading experience with informed product opinions
