Founding Engineer

SOLANA FOUNDATION; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid/remote options

Equity stake

Direct access to founders

Early-stage impact

Job summary

Proto is seeking a founding engineer to own the backend and quantitative systems powering our prediction market products. This hands-on role spans architecture, implementation, research, and production operations, offering meaningful influence over both product and the engineering organization.

Ideal candidates have 4+ years of professional engineering experience and 3+ years in web3/crypto, with strong backend and system-design skills, plus experience with DeFi protocols and AI-assisted

Qualifications

• 3+ years of full-time experience in web3/crypto development.
• 4+ years of professional engineering experience in technology roles.
• Founding-engineer mindset with ownership and speed.
• Strong backend engineering and system design fundamentals.
• Experience building reliable, scalable data-intensive systems.
• Experience with DeFi protocols and financial primitives is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own backend and quantitative systems powering prediction market products.
• Design, implement and operate production-grade systems across architecture and research.
• Collaborate with founders and engineers to influence product and engineering culture.
• Contribute to AI-assisted software development with emphasis on reliability.

Skills

Backend engineering

System design

Data-intensive systems

Web3/crypto development

AI-assisted development

DeFi protocols

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Solana

Anchor

Job description

ABOUT THE COMPANY

• Proto is making the world's biggest macro themes directly tradable for the first time: data center growth, AI capex, GPU manufacturing, US foreign arms sales, as easy as trading on Robinhood. Private mainnet beta on Solana launching Fall 2026.

• We’re building a new market mechanism designed to improve how markets handle a broader range of scalar outcomes. Rather than re-using perpetual futures or traditional binary predictions, our approach enables more continuous price discovery through a novel market structure, creating a more efficient and intuitive trading experience while enabling 10-20x leverage.

• Built by a veteran ex-Phantom team (VP Product at Ondo, Quant Research at Citadel, experience leading teams at Google, Pinterest, Facebook, and Carta), with early angels including the founders of Phantom, Jito, Pendle, Goldsky, Meld, and SimpleHash.

Description

We're looking for a founding engineer to own the backend and quantitative systems that power our prediction market products. This is a hands‑on role for someone who can move between architecture, implementation, research, and production operations and who wants meaningful influence over both the product and the engineering organization.

What we're looking for

• A founding-engineer mindset: high ownership, speed, pragmatism, and comfort operating with ambiguity

• Strong backend engineering and system design fundamentals

• Experience building reliable, scalable, data-intensive systems

• Quantitative or research‑oriented ability, such as experience with trading systems, financial data, modeling, experimentation, or translating research ideas into production systems

• Experience with DeFi protocols and financial primitives, such as lending and borrowing markets, collateralized debt positions, stablecoins, automated market makers, liquid staking, restaking, real‑world asset protocols, tokenized treasuries, or on‑chain credit systems

• Strong ability to reason about, direct, and validate AI‑assisted software development, with a focus on producing efficient, reliable, production‑quality code

• 3+ years of full‑time experience in web3/crypto development

• 4+ years of professional engineering experience, excluding internships, in relevant roles at technology and product‑driven companies.

Nice to haves

• Experience with trading infrastructure, market data, exchanges, risk systems, payment systems, or other correctness‑critical financial software

• Experience with derivatives such as perpetuals, futures, options, CFDs, or prediction markets

• Experience designing systems in which settlement correctness and reconciliation are load‑bearing

• Contributions to open‑source infrastructure or protocol software

• Experience working closely with quantitative researchers

• Experience building protocols at scale ($10M+ TVL or 10k+ users)

• Multiple Solana programs shipped to mainnet, in Anchor and/or native Solana. You are fluent in the account model, PDAs, CPIs, compute budgets, and the actual pitfalls - account substitution, owner‑check oversight, bump‑seed canonicalization, CPI reentrancy, sysvar swaps, realloc edge cases

How we work

• Small, flat team with direct access to the founders

• High ownership and fast decisions

• Written reasoning and explicit technical tradeoffs

• AI-assisted development with human accountability

• A bias toward simple, observable, production‑ready systems

What we offer

• A founding engineer seat with substantial ownership of the technical architecture from day one

• Direct influence over the product, roadmap, and engineering culture

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity, calibrated to seniority and location

• The opportunity to build a technically ambitious financial system from its earliest stage

• Hybrid/remote options available, with team off‑sites

• Small flat team, fast decisions

• Tax Planning Opportunities for maximizing QSBS Benefits