Lead Engineer, Frontier Traders

WHO WE ARE The Solana Foundation is a non-profit 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 Frontier Traders is a community and rewards platform for elite firms and traders working at the frontier of emerging assets, markets, and technology. It brings trading activity from across the Solana ecosystem into one place, where traders earn rewards, compete in campaigns for prize pools, climb leaderboards, and progress through VIP tiers that unlock rebates and infrastructure access. The product tracks spot and perpetuals volume across every venue on Solana, spanning RWAs, tokenized equities, and the long tail of ecosystem assets. Its users are demanding by nature: proprietary trading firms, market makers, and HFTs, alongside the onchain traders moving real volume every day. They notice when a number is wrong, and they expect the product to keep pace with the market. The platform integrates with more than 25 ecosystem partners across DEXs, perpetuals venues, launchpads, wallets, and data infrastructure, including Jupiter, Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, Pump.fun http://Pump.fun, Phantom, Helius, and Pyth. THE OPPORTUNITY Solana Foundation is seeking a Lead Engineer to own Frontier Traders end to end, with a particular focus on building the trader-facing product and experiences that sit on top of Solana's markets and data. This is a role for an engineer who is genuinely talented at building products. You should be as comfortable thinking through an interaction, designing a frontend architecture, and shipping a polished experience as you are working through the APIs, data models, and indexing infrastructure behind it. Frontier is a data-rich trading product: numbers need to be correct, interfaces need to be fast, and complex market activity needs to feel intuitive to the person on the other side of the screen. You will work in a small team with unusual autonomy, directly alongside Foundation stakeholders and the trading firms who use the product. You won't be handed narrowly scoped frontend tickets or a predetermined roadmap. You will own the product technically from end to end, develop opinions about what should be built, and turn those ideas into experiences traders actually want to use. TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN THIS ROLE YOU WILL: • Own the technical direction and delivery of Frontier Traders end to end, with particular ownership of the trader-facing product and user experience • Build polished, responsive interfaces for sophisticated traders, turning complex market, portfolio, rewards, and trading data into products that feel simple and intuitive • Ship realtime product experiences including portfolio views, activity feeds, leaderboards, campaign dashboards, tier progression, and other data-heavy interfaces that remain fast and accurate under market load • Take new products and features from idea through architecture, implementation, and launch, making thoughtful decisions across the frontend, APIs, backend services, and underlying data • Build the product experiences behind campaigns, points, prize pools, VIP tiers, and rebates, ensuring users can clearly understand their activity, performance, rewards, and progression • Work with Solana onchain data and indexing infrastructure to ensure the product accurately represents trading activity across spot and perpetuals venues throughout the ecosystem • Own integrations with ecosystem partners across DEXs, perps venues, launchpads, wallets, and data providers, and turn those integrations into cohesive user experiences • Work directly with traders, firms, and market makers to understand how they use Frontier, identify opportunities, and turn their feedback into shipped product • Set the engineering bar for the product across frontend architecture, performance, code quality, testing, observability, and reliability • Make pragmatic build-versus-integrate decisions that allow Frontier to move quickly while maintaining the quality expected by a sophisticated trading audience • Partner closely with design, product, and the Foundation's Trading and Growth teams to shape both what gets built and how it should work YOU IDEALLY HAVE: • A track record of building and shipping user-facing products end to end, with clear personal ownership from idea through launch and iteration • Deep expertise in modern frontend engineering, particularly TypeScript/JavaScript and frameworks such as React/Next.js, with experience building complex, data-rich applications • Strong full-stack engineering fundamentals and the ability to move comfortably between frontend applications, APIs, backend services, databases, and data infrastructure when the product requires it • Experience building realtime, data-intensive interfaces where performance, accuracy, state management, and usability all matter • Strong product instincts and a demonstrated ability to make thoughtful UX decisions rather than simply implement predetermined designs • Experience with data pipelines, indexing, or realtime systems, and enough depth to understand how data moves from its source through to the product experience • Working knowledge of Solana, including accounts, transactions, program interactions, and how to reliably index and surface onchain activity • Familiarity with DeFi market structure, including spot and perpetuals venues, AMMs and order books, maker and taker dynamics, and how fees and rebates work • Comfort operating across an entire product stack and taking ownership when a problem falls outside your primary area of expertise • Comfort operating with ambiguity, limited process, and evolving priorities • Excellent communication, including the ability to work directly with demanding external users and translate their needs into thoughtful product and technical decisions BONUS POINTS: • You have built trading interfaces, portfolio products, financial dashboards, or other products used by sophisticated financial users • Experience with points, rewards, loyalty, or incentive systems at scale, including the adversarial side of designing them • Hands-on experience with Solana data infrastructure such as Helius, Pyth, Geyser plugins, or custom indexers • Experience with Rust or building/indexing applications that interact directly with Solana programs • Open source contributions to Solana or DeFi tooling • You trade onchain yourself and have strong opinions about the products you use