Solana Program Engineer
The Solana Foundation is a Swiss non-profit foundation based in Zug that supports decentralization, adoption, security, grants, and validator delegation for the Solana ecosystem.
Maintainer signals as of 9/25/2026
About Solana Foundation
The Solana Foundation is a non-profit steward of the Solana ecosystem. Its current activities include funding public goods, supporting open-source development and research, operating a validator delegation program, and promoting network decentralization, security, and adoption. It is distinct from Solana Labs, which transferred protocol intellectual property to the Foundation in 2020.
Skills
About the Role
Build and ship production-grade Solana programs in Rust using Anchor or Native, design DeFi protocols and onchain applications, reason about system trade-offs, contribute to open source and developer tools, and optimize programs for performance and constrained environments.
Requirements
- 2+ years of experience building and shipping Solana programs
- Strong familiarity with Solana’s runtime
- Strong familiarity with SPL tokens
- Strong familiarity with PDAs
- Strong familiarity with Anchor
- Hands-on experience building or contributing to DeFi protocols
- Understanding of state compression
- Understanding of account metering
- Understanding of program optimization
- Familiarity with Solana-native DeFi protocols such as OpenBook, Jupiter, MarginFi, Orca, or Meteora
Responsibilities
- Build high-performance production-grade Solana programs in Rust
- Develop Solana programs using Anchor or Native
- Build DeFi protocols and onchain applications
- Take ideas from 0 to 1 and iterate with real users
- Reason about technical trade-offs and system design under constraints
- Contribute to open source projects
- Improve developer tools
- Build smart contract wallets and programmable access systems
- Build gasless relayers and session keys
- Build indexers and custom RPCs
- Contribute to Anchor and Pinocchio
- Develop token launch frameworks and fair distribution tooling
- Develop real-world asset registries and payment rails
- Develop DePIN coordination systems
Hiring Process
Submit your information through the open application. The team will reach out as opportunities arise; selected candidates may be matched with ecosystem teams or Foundation internal contributors based on skills, interests, and availability.
