Founding Protocol Engineer, Solana

$180k to $230k + founding equity | Remote | US time zones 

A newly funded Solana team is building a prediction market that trades like a perp.

Two founders today, backed by a major exchange’s venture arm, an L1 foundation grant, and angels who founded some of the ecosystem’s best known wallets and infrastructure protocols. Private mainnet beta later this year.

This is the first engineering hire. You own the settlement protocol and sit in the room for the mechanism design, not implementing a finished spec.

Responsibilities

• Own the economic mechanism with the founders: margin model, liquidation ordering, OI limits, position sizing

• Architect the settlement program: vaults, position accounting, market state machines

• Build the signed-quote fill path, atomic in a single transaction

• Own the on-chain numerics and fixed-point math for margin, liquidations and settlement

• Design the two-oracle surface, runtime mark and verified-actual settlement flow

• Own collateral and risk primitives: PDA vaults, insurance fund, pause guardians, emergency withdraw

• Work with an external risk firm founded by ex-Gauntlet quants on simulations and backtesting

• Drive audits, fuzz harnesses, invariant docs and threat modelling

Requirements

• Genuine DeFi depth. You can argue about margin, liquidation and oracle design, not just implement it

• Real interest in mechanism design, with opinions on where existing venues got it right or wrong

• Multiple Solana programs shipped to mainnet, fluent in the account model, PDAs, CPIs and compute budgets

• Written or materially contributed to contracts holding non-trivial value. A Solana DeFi protocol is the clearest signal, founding your own also counts

• Strong Rust and systems background in production

• Deep familiarity with SPL Token and Token-2022 custody patterns

• Security-first instinct on signer checks, replay, oracle manipulation and arithmetic edge cases

• Track record through a serious audit

• 4+ years web3, 6+ years professional engineering

Nice to have

• Margined DeFi primitives: perps, CFDs, fixed-expiry futures, options

• Signed-quote or RFQ settlement, or hybrid off-chain/on-chain venues

• Production integrations with Pyth, Switchboard or similar

• Prediction markets or derivatives where the oracle was the critical dependency

• Open source Solana contributions or SIMDs

Benefits

• Founding engineer seat with technical ownership of the settlement protocol from day one

• $180k to $230k base plus founding-level equity

• Company-funded QSBS trust setup, paid for by the company, for this hire specifically

• Full health, dental and vision cover, plus computer, phone and internet expensed

• Fully remote with team off-sites, small flat team, fast decisions