Software Engineer, Storage

Who We Are

Solana is the leading high-performance network powering internet capital markets, payments, and crypto applications, built to become the capital market for every asset on earth. The company is the core engineering team behind it. Founded by the engineers who built the original Solana validator client at Solana Labs, we develop Agave, the network’s primary and most widely run validator client, and ship the software that pushes the boundaries of blockchain performance and scale.

We advance the frontier of Solana’s core protocol. Most recently, the company built and shipped Alpenglow, the biggest upgrade in Solana’s history, replacing the network’s original consensus protocol and bringing deterministic finality in about 150ms to mainnet-beta. And we’re just getting started, with work underway on faster block propagation, quicker leader handoffs, and the infrastructure that will carry Solana’s next phase of growth.

The Role

As a Software Engineer specializing in storage, you will play a critical role in fortifying the company’s Agave client and the broader Solana network. The AccountsDB team owns the custom storage engine at the heart of every Solana validator. Every account on Solana, from balances to program state to token holdings, lives in AccountsDB, and every transaction the network processes reads from and writes to it.

Your work will directly contribute to the performance and reliability of our blockchain infrastructure, ensuring account state is stored, indexed, and served efficiently as the network grows.

Requirements

Responsibilities

• Develop and Optimize the Storage Engine: Design, implement, and optimize AccountsDB’s core storage paths, including account file layout, the account index, and the read and write caching layers, to improve throughput and latency across the validator.

• Reduce Resource Footprint: Lower memory and disk requirements as account state continues to grow, to keep validator hardware requirements in check.

• Background Services: Improve the flushing, cleaning, shrinking, and purging processes to reduce write amplification and keep resource usage predictable under sustained load.

• Snapshots and Startup: Optimize snapshot generation, loading, and index generation to shorten validator startup and catch-up times.

• Correctness and Integrity: Ensure account state remains correct across forks, rooting, and crash recovery, where bugs can have network-wide consequences.

• Testing and Validation: Create and execute comprehensive tests to validate the reliability and efficiency of the storage engine, including stress tests, fault injection, and performance benchmarking.

• Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including runtime, block production, and core protocol engineers, as well as other Solana client teams, to ensure seamless integration of storage components across the validator.

• Documentation and Code Review: Maintain thorough documentation of AccountsDB design and behavior and conduct peer code reviews to uphold high standards of code quality and consistency.

What You'll Bring

• Systems Engineering Background: Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, or relevant practical experience, alongside 3+ years architecting data stores, file systems, databases, or high-throughput storage systems.

• Systems Languages & Storage Architecture: Mastery of Rust, C, or C++. Comprehensive grasp of low-level storage mechanics, including memory-mapped files, page caching, index structures, on-disk formats, and garbage collection mechanisms.

• I/O Subsystems: Advanced knowledge of kernel-level and hardware I/O pipelines, NVMe constraints, buffered versus direct I/O, and modern async interfaces like io_uring.

• Kernel & Memory Management: Strong understanding of custom memory allocators and Linux kernel scheduling, page management, and I/O handling under intense throughput.

• Concurrent Programming: Proven experience building concurrent systems, featuring deep knowledge of lock overhead, lock-free structures, and hardware memory models.

• Profiling and Optimization: Track record of profiling and tuning low-level code with an emphasis on hardware mechanics, memory bus saturation, and CPU cache efficiency.

• Systemic Problem Solving: Ability to debug intricate software architectures, isolate performance bottlenecks, and execute robust engineering solutions.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Exceptional communication skills and a team-first mindset for working alongside technical peers in an open environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with LSM trees, B-trees, or hash-based storage engines such as RocksDB, LevelDB, or WiredTiger.

• Background in versioned or multi-version data stores, snapshotting systems, or blockchain state storage.

• Familiarity with Linux, systems automation tools, and systems architecture.

• Active participation in Bitcoin/Ethereum/Blockchain projects or the open-source community is highly desirable.

Benefits

Why Join the company?

We offer a dynamic, fast-paced environment where innovation and problem-solving are at the heart of everything we do. Here, your work will have a direct impact on the security and scalability of blockchain technology, contributing to the foundation of decentralized applications worldwide.

We're excited to welcome individuals who share our passion for pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology. If you're ready to take on the challenge and contribute to the next generation of blockchain infrastructure, we'd love to hear from you.