What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Protocol Engineer position at solana?
Who We Are:
At Solana Mobile, we are working to bring Solana and web3 to the palm of your hand on mobile. In 2023 we shipped the Saga phone with Seed Vault to secure Solana wallets with HW backed security and built the dApp Store as a developer friendly place to bring web3 apps to users. We also implement and provide the Solana Mobile Stack to developers to simplify building web3 dApps for mobile. In 2025 we continued this journey with the release of Seeker, which has shipped to 150k customers in 50 countries.
The Role:
To build the next chapter of Solana Mobile, we are seeking a Senior Protocol Engineer to join our team full-time. The ideal candidate is a highly organized, versatile individual who will build and ship Solana programs that will drive Solana Mobile’s ecosystem and drive adoption of the next generation of Solana Mobile developers and users.
The core responsibility of this role is to build and own Solana programs that are instrumental for the health and growth of the Solana Mobile ecosystem. You will build unique on-chain programs for the purpose of token operations, including staking, voting and governance. You will work with backend engineers to build infrastructure and APIs to connect users, developers and decentralized gate-keepers of the Solana Mobile device ecosystem. You create efficiency for operations by stream-lining the monitoring of performance, stability and security of Solana Mobile’s infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and ship new Solana on-chain programs for staking, voting and governance, based on Rust.
- Create new APIs to securely interact with on-chain programs.
- Enhance the speed, performance, and reliability of existing web-based services driving the mobile application store and other core services.
- Implement and operate automated web deployments in a containerized application environment (AWS).
- Be ready to participate in on-call rotation.
Required Skills & Experience:
- Proficiency coding Rust, with track record of smart contracts in production.
- Deep understanding of the Solana blockchain, its runtime and composability.
- Experience building scalable and fault-tolerant backend systems, including HTTP REST APIs, web services and data storage.
- Strong understanding of networking (OSI, NAT), computer science (common algorithms, space/time complexity), relational databases, common attack vectors (SQL injection, XSS), common engineering patterns (state machines, idempotency, optimistic locking) and cryptography.
- Working knowledge of Unix/Linux - processes, system calls, shell scripting.
- Experience working within a small team that independently translates product requirements into execution and results.
- Bachelor of Science in Computer Science or higher degree.
- 3 years of work experience as Protocol Software Engineer.
- 5 years of work experience as Backend Engineer.
- Able to work remotely within US time zones. Office available in New York City.
- Strong communications skills both written and verbal.
Nice to Haves:
- Interest or experience in blockchain applications and ecosystem tools.
- Contributions to open-source Android or security-related projects.
Solana Mobile is an equal opportunity employer.