Principal Security Engineer (Solana)

OpenZeppelin; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenZeppelin is seeking a Principal Solana Developer to set the technical direction for our Solana practice and shape how it grows, with your name attached to the work and our reputation amplified as a result.

Your focus includes the confidential computing track on Solana, porting onchain fully homomorphic encryption primitives to the SVM runtime, and guiding the development of developer abstractions, audits, and tooling across our portfolio.

Qualifications

• Experience leading Solana development programs
• Strong Rust development skills
• Security-focused software engineering background

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for OpenZeppelin's Solana practice and establish its open reputation.
• Lead confidential computing initiatives on Solana, including HE primitive porting to the SVM runtime.
• Oversee Solana audits, contribute to open-source libraries and tooling, and collaborate with the Solana Foundation.

Job description

About us

OpenZeppelin is the security standard onchain finance is built on. Founded in 2015, our mission is to accelerate the world's transition to an open financial system, built on open standards and secured by rigorous research.

Our open-source Contract Libraries have facilitated over $35 trillion in onchain value and are used by 10 of the top 10 tokenized money market funds and 9 of the top 10 stablecoins by market cap.

We combine AI-native security tooling with deep research and a decade of audit expertise to support leading institutions and crypto-native teams shaping the next generation of digital assets like DTCC, Fidelity, Coinbase, Uniswap, Aave, the Ethereum Foundation, and many more across the full secure development lifecycle.

Please note: Always refer to OpenZeppelin's official job page for the most accurate information about our open roles, as we have seen multiple third party job sites posting inaccurate information.

Secure Development team

OpenZeppelin is the security partner of choice for the most important protocols in Web3. Our Secure Development team sits at the intersection of building and breaking: we design, implement, and harden production-grade libraries and smart contracts for leading projects across EVM, Starknet, Stellar/Soroban, Arbitrum Stylus, Aptos, and beyond, often as an embedded extension of the client's engineering team.

We work the way the rest of the industry will five years from now. Every developer on the team is a fully AI-native engineer, supported by outstanding internal AI tooling built for every phase of secure development. Developers own their workstreams end-to-end — agents amplify their effectiveness, and peers, security researchers, and external auditors provide rigorous review on every piece of work that ships.

Principal Solana Developer

We are looking for a Principal Solana Developer to set the technical direction for our work on the SVM. This is not a seat on an existing Solana team: you are the person who defines what OpenZeppelin's Solana practice looks like, in the open and under your own name, so your reputation compounds with ours.

Engagement

Your first focus is our confidential computing track on Solana: porting onchain fully homomorphic encryption primitives to the SVM runtime, designing the confidential token standard and the SDK patterns on top of it, and building the developer abstractions that make it usable. It runs into 2027, it is public, and it is coordinated directly with the Solana Foundation. The open design questions are yours to own: access control list storage cost, program upgradability and governance, and how to express confidential DeFi flows idiomatically on Solana rather than transliterating them from EVM.

Beyond that engagement, you are the SVM technical lead across our portfolio: shaping how we scope and staff Solana audits, contributing to our open source libraries and tooling, and giving the security research team the depth they need when a program lands on their desk.

Within this engagement,