Solana Program Engineer

Who We Are

The Solana Foundation is a non-profit organization 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

The Foundation collaborates with both internal contributors and external ecosystem teams to solve key technical challenges and accelerate the development of core infrastructure, developer tooling, and open-source standards. This includes everything from on-chain protocols to growth tooling, smart contract frameworks, and new developer experiences.

We work closely with many of the most ambitious teams in crypto — including those building next-generation DeFi, payments, gaming, DePIN, and Real-World Asset platforms.

The Opportunity

We’re looking for talented Solana Program Engineers, with a strong emphasis on developers who have built — or want to build — cutting-edge DeFi protocols on Solana.

This is an open application to express your interest in working on one of several high-impact teams across the Solana ecosystem. Depending on your background and interests, we may connect you with projects building:

• Advanced DeFi Protocols: Central Limit Order Books (CLOBs), on-chain AMMs, hybrid liquidity models, lending markets, margin trading, perps, and liquidations.
• Core Infrastructure & Tooling: Smart contract wallets, gasless relayers, session keys, indexers, custom RPCs, and Anchor or Pinocchio contributions.
• On-chain Applications & Middleware: Token launch frameworks, real-world asset registries, payment rails, and DePIN coordination networks.

You'll Be Great at This If You…

• Program Mastery: Build high-performance, production-grade Solana programs in Rust (Anchor or Native).
• DeFi Native: Are genuinely passionate about DeFi and intimately familiar with on-chain mechanics.
• 0 to 1 Iteration: Love taking ideas from technical formulation to production deployment and iterating quickly with real users.
• Systems Reasoner: Can effectively reason about complex technical trade-offs and distributed system designs under absolute performance constraints.
• Enjoy contributing to open-source protocols and improving the broad ecosystem developer experience.