How to Apply to Solana

10 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 11 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Solana Labs (San Francisco / New York, fully distributed) is the for-profit product company; the Solana Foundation (Zug, Switzerland) is the non-profit ecosystem steward. Apply to the right one: Labs hires through Ashby at jobs.ashbyhq.com/solanalabs, ecosystem roles aggregate at jobs.solana.com.
  • The hiring bar is FAANG-level on systems engineering plus crypto-native fluency; generic 'web3 enthusiast' resumes get filtered out fast. Show real Solana usage and contributions.
  • Rust is the dominant language for protocol, runtime, and validator work; TypeScript dominates SDK, wallet, and dApp tooling. Pick the lane that matches your background and go deep.
  • Compensation is structured around base + SOL token grants with multi-year vesting plus benefits; total comp is competitive with top crypto and FAANG, but a meaningful share is denominated in SOL.
  • Public on-chain and open-source work is currency: GitHub history on solana-labs / anza-xyz / anchor, deployed programs, validator operations, audit reports, and SIMD contributions can outweigh formal credentials.
  • Interview loops emphasize distributed systems, low-latency performance, security under adversarial conditions, and clear written communication; expect to defend an opinion on Solana's architecture vs. competitors.
  • Cultural fit filters hard for high agency, calm under fire (Solana has had public outages and a public regulatory fight), and bias to ship; passive, process-heavy candidates struggle.
  • Many of the most interesting engineering roles are now at adjacent companies in the Solana ecosystem: Anza (validator client), Jito Labs (MEV/staking), Jump Crypto's Firedancer team (alternative validator client), Phantom (wallets), Helius (RPC/data). Cast a wide net across the ecosystem, not just Solana Labs.
  • Be ready to explain, on day one of interviews, why Solana's monolithic, high-throughput, single-state-machine design wins over modular and rollup-centric alternatives; this is a load-bearing question, not small talk.

About Solana

Solana Labs, Inc. is the San Francisco-based technology company that built and launched the Solana blockchain in March 2020, founded in 2018 by Anatoly 'Toly' Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. Solana Labs develops products, tools, and reference implementations for the Solana network, a high-performance Layer 1 proof-of-stake blockchain known for its sub-second finality, sub-cent transaction fees, and capacity to process tens of thousands of transactions per second. Working alongside Solana Labs is the Solana Foundation, a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, dedicated to the decentralization, adoption, and security of the Solana ecosystem through grants, validator delegation programs, and public-goods funding. Together they form the institutional core of one of the largest blockchain ecosystems in crypto, with SOL consistently ranking among the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Solana Labs is a fully distributed team with offices in San Francisco and New York and remote engineers across the globe. Headcount across Solana Labs and the Foundation is generally estimated in the 300 to 500 range, with hundreds more contributors across the Solana Validator client teams (Anza, Jito, Firedancer/Jump Crypto), wallet teams (Phantom, Backpack), and ecosystem companies. Solana Labs is most visibly the team behind the Solana Seeker (formerly Saga) Web3 mobile device, the Solana Mobile Stack, and Solana Pay. The Foundation runs the broader ecosystem programs including the Solana Grants Program, the Foundation Delegation Program for validators, and Breakpoint, the flagship annual conference. The culture is unapologetically engineering-first, fast-shipping, and 'crypto-native.' Many employees are deep believers in the Solana technical thesis: that a single global state machine optimized for throughput and low latency will win over modular, sharded, or rollup-based architectures. The company has weathered serious turbulence including network outages, the FTX collapse (FTX/Alameda were major SOL holders), an SEC suit alleging SOL is an unregistered security, and a 2022 wallet exploit, and emerged stronger each time. That history of high-stakes recovery shapes the hiring bar: Solana Labs hires people who can operate calmly in genuinely adversarial conditions and who treat reliability, performance, and security as moral obligations, not engineering preferences.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Identify the right entity: Solana Labs (the for-profit product company, hires vi

    Identify the right entity: Solana Labs (the for-profit product company, hires via Ashby at jobs.ashbyhq.com/solanalabs) versus the Solana Foundation (non-profit, hires through the ecosystem job board at jobs.solana.com) versus ecosystem companies like Anza, Jito Labs, Phantom, Helius, and Jump Crypto's Firedancer team that all hire separately.

  2. 2
    Apply directly through the Ashby application form for Solana Labs roles, or thro

    Apply directly through the Ashby application form for Solana Labs roles, or through the relevant ecosystem company's ATS (most use Ashby, Greenhouse, or Lever); avoid third-party crypto recruiter spam and never pay anyone to 'submit' your resume.

  3. 3
    Expect a recruiter screen within one to two weeks for in-demand roles, focused o

    Expect a recruiter screen within one to two weeks for in-demand roles, focused on motivation for crypto/Solana specifically, prior on-chain work, comp expectations, and location/timezone fit for the SF or NYC hub.

  4. 4
    Complete one or two technical screens depending on the role: a coding interview

    Complete one or two technical screens depending on the role: a coding interview (often algorithms or systems-level Rust/TypeScript), and a domain-specific deep dive (consensus, runtime, validator performance, MEV, token economics, cryptography, or product/protocol design).

  5. 5
    Pass an on-site loop of four to six interviews covering deep technical, system d

    Pass an on-site loop of four to six interviews covering deep technical, system design, behavioral and values fit, and one or two interviews with senior ICs or leaders evaluating ecosystem judgment and crypto thesis.

  6. 6
    Receive a written take-home or paid trial only if it adds clear signal; many Sol

    Receive a written take-home or paid trial only if it adds clear signal; many Solana ecosystem roles weight prior public/open-source contributions, GitHub history on solana-labs/agave/anza-xyz, and on-chain artifacts more heavily than synthetic take-homes.

  7. 7
    Negotiate the full package, which typically includes base salary, SOL token gran

    Negotiate the full package, which typically includes base salary, SOL token grant with vesting (often four years with a one-year cliff), and sometimes equity in Solana Labs, plus benefits; expect compensation to be benchmarked aggressively against top crypto and FAANG offers but heavily weighted to token upside.

Resume Tips for Solana

recommended

Lead with on-chain credibility: link your GitHub, your wallet/ENS or Solana addr

Lead with on-chain credibility: link your GitHub, your wallet/ENS or Solana address with public contributions, any programs (smart contracts) you have deployed on mainnet or devnet, validators you have run, and any open-source PRs to agave, anza-xyz, anchor, or related repos.

recommended

Quantify performance and reliability work: 'reduced p99 latency from 800ms to 90

Quantify performance and reliability work: 'reduced p99 latency from 800ms to 90ms,' 'kept validator at 99.98% uptime over 6 months,' 'shipped runtime change that lifted TPS by 22%' beats vague claims about 'high-performance systems.'

recommended

Show Rust depth if you are applying to validator, runtime, or core protocol role

Show Rust depth if you are applying to validator, runtime, or core protocol roles; for SDK, tooling, or wallet roles show TypeScript/React plus a clear understanding of Solana's account model, transactions, and program-derived addresses.

recommended

Demonstrate adversarial thinking: include security audits you have led or contri

Demonstrate adversarial thinking: include security audits you have led or contributed to, CTF results, bug bounties (Immunefi, Code4rena, Sherlock), or post-mortems you authored, especially around consensus, MEV, oracles, or bridge security.

recommended

Treat the Solana technical thesis seriously: a single sentence in your summary t

Treat the Solana technical thesis seriously: a single sentence in your summary that shows you understand why monolithic high-throughput L1, Proof of History, parallel execution (Sealevel), and QUIC matter will outperform a generic 'passionate about web3' line.

recommended

Highlight crypto-native distribution and product chops for non-engineering roles

Highlight crypto-native distribution and product chops for non-engineering roles: communities grown, devrel content shipped, hackathons run, ecosystem grants deployed, partnerships closed with measurable on-chain outcomes (TVL, daily active wallets, transaction volume).

recommended

Keep it ATS-clean: single column, standard section headings (Experience, Skills,

Keep it ATS-clean: single column, standard section headings (Experience, Skills, Education), no graphics or text-in-images, save as PDF; Solana Labs uses Ashby, which parses well but rewards structured, scannable resumes.

recommended

Cut anything that is not crypto-relevant past one line; a tight one-page resume

Cut anything that is not crypto-relevant past one line; a tight one-page resume that screams 'Rust + distributed systems + shipped on Solana' beats a three-page generalist resume every time.

ATS System: Ashby

Solana Labs uses Ashby (jobs.ashbyhq.com/solanalabs) as its applicant tracking system for direct Solana Labs roles. Ashby is a modern, structured ATS that parses single-column PDF resumes cleanly, supports rich application questions, and gives recruiters strong filtering by skills, location, and experience. The Solana Foundation-managed ecosystem job board at jobs.solana.com is powered by Getro and aggregates roles from hundreds of ecosystem companies, most of which use Ashby, Greenhouse, or Lever themselves; clicking through routes you to each company's native ATS.

  • Submit a single-column PDF resume with standard section headings (Experience, Skills, Education, Projects); Ashby parses these cleanly and structured fields populate your profile automatically.
  • Fill out every optional Ashby application field, including links to GitHub, X/Twitter, personal site, wallet/ENS or Solana address, and any on-chain artifacts; recruiters filter on these.
  • Use the cover letter or 'Why Solana?' free-text field to make a specific, evidence-backed pitch (cite a SIMD, a recent outage post-mortem, or a piece of dev tooling you used) rather than generic enthusiasm.
  • Mirror the exact role title and three to five core keywords from the JD in your resume Skills section so Ashby search and recruiter filters surface you reliably.
  • If you have a referral, route through it; Ashby surfaces referrals prominently and Solana Labs (like most crypto-native companies) weights internal referrals heavily.
  • Check that your resume PDF is text-searchable (not a scanned image) and under 2 MB; Ashby will accept larger files but recruiters scan text, not pictures.

Complete Ashby Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Interviews at Solana Labs and across the broader Solana orbit are direct, technically demanding, and unapologetically opinionated.

Interviewers are themselves practicing engineers, protocol designers, or operators who have shipped to a network that processes billions of dollars in real value, and they assume candidates have done their homework on Solana's architecture before showing up. Expect to be asked, in some form: 'Why Solana and not Ethereum, Aptos, Sui, or a rollup?' A candidate who waves at 'speed and low fees' will not pass. A candidate who can talk about Proof of History as a verifiable delay function, Sealevel's parallel execution, the validator's TPU and TVU pipelines, QUIC adoption, or the trade-offs of monolithic versus modular blockchain design will stand out immediately. For engineering loops, the bar is high on systems fundamentals. Coding interviews tend to be language-flexible at the first round (most candidates use Rust, Go, TypeScript, or Python) but Rust fluency is heavily weighted for protocol, runtime, and validator roles. System design questions skew toward distributed systems realities: gossip protocols, leader rotation, fork choice, mempool design, replication and consistency under partitions, hot-path latency optimization, and capacity planning under adversarial load. Behavioral interviews probe how you respond when production breaks at 3am, how you handle disagreement with senior ICs, and whether you can ship without permission while still respecting blast radius. Solana has had real outages; nobody at the company wants to hire engineers who freeze under fire or who treat post-mortems as performance theater. Cultural fit is filtered explicitly for crypto-native conviction. The team is mission-driven about scaling a global, permissionless financial system, and that belief shows up in interview questions about decentralization trade-offs, censorship resistance, regulatory posture, and on-chain product behavior. Communication style trends toward Twitter-/X-fluent, fast, sometimes blunt, and allergic to corporate jargon. The best signal you can send: arrive having read recent Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs), having tried the dev tooling (anchor, solana CLI, web3.js or kit), and having a real opinion, defended with evidence, on at least one current ecosystem debate (e.g., MEV/Jito, Firedancer rollout, token extensions, mobile, stablecoin issuance on Solana).

What Solana Looks For

  • Genuine crypto-native conviction: candidates who have used Solana, hold a wallet, have transacted, ideally have shipped or contributed something on-chain, not tourists looking for the next hot industry.
  • Elite systems engineering ability: deep comfort with Rust, distributed systems primitives (consensus, gossip, replication), low-latency networking (QUIC, UDP), and squeezing performance out of hardware.
  • High agency and ownership: people who diagnose problems end-to-end, ship without waiting for permission, and treat reliability incidents as personal responsibility rather than ticket queue work.
  • Adversarial security mindset: a default assumption that every system will be attacked, every assumption will be probed, and every privileged action needs defense in depth, especially in a context where bugs cost real money.
  • Strong written and public communication: ability to write clear SIMDs, post-mortems, technical blog posts, and X/Twitter threads; the Solana ecosystem is unusually public and your work will be visible.
  • Pragmatic product judgment for non-protocol roles: ability to ship developer tools, wallets, mobile experiences, and consumer apps that real users adopt, measured in retained wallets and transactions rather than vanity metrics.
  • Resilience under volatility: comfort with bear markets, hostile press cycles, network incidents, and regulatory uncertainty without losing focus or output quality.
  • Bias to open source and public work: a track record of contributions to public repos, public talks, public writeups, and public artifacts; private-only work is a weaker signal in this ecosystem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation, and which one should I apply to?
Solana Labs, Inc. is the for-profit San Francisco / New York technology company that originally built the Solana blockchain and now ships products like Solana Seeker (the Web3 phone), Solana Pay, and the Solana Mobile Stack; it hires through Ashby at jobs.ashbyhq.com/solanalabs. The Solana Foundation is a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, focused on decentralization, grants, validator delegation, and ecosystem health. Foundation roles and broader ecosystem roles (Anza, Jito Labs, Phantom, Helius, Jump's Firedancer team, and hundreds of dApp companies) are aggregated on the Solana Foundation-managed job board at jobs.solana.com. If you want to ship consumer-facing products tightly integrated with the protocol, Labs is your target; if you want to run grants programs, validator decentralization initiatives, or ecosystem development, the Foundation is your target.
Do I need to know Rust to get hired?
For protocol, runtime, validator, and core infrastructure roles, yes, Rust is effectively required and you should be comfortable reading and writing production-quality async Rust, including unsafe blocks where justified. For SDK, wallet, mobile (Android/iOS), web frontend, dApp, devrel, and product roles, Rust is a strong nice-to-have but not mandatory; TypeScript, Swift, Kotlin, and Go all show up regularly. If you do not know Rust today and you want to work on the protocol, that gap is fixable but takes serious months of practice; building a small Solana program with Anchor is a good entry point.
Is on-chain experience required, or will Solana Labs hire smart engineers without crypto background?
Solana Labs absolutely hires strong engineers from outside crypto, especially in distributed systems, networking, performance, and security backgrounds. However, you will be expected to demonstrate genuine intellectual engagement with crypto by interview time. That means having installed a wallet, made transactions, ideally written a small program or hello-world dApp, read at least the Solana whitepaper and a few SIMDs, and being able to articulate why you want to work on this problem now. 'Crypto-curious' is fine; 'crypto-skeptical' or 'just want a high-paying job' will not survive the values screen.
How is compensation structured, and is it really paid in SOL?
Yes, a meaningful portion of compensation at Solana Labs and across the ecosystem is denominated in SOL token grants, typically with multi-year vesting (often four years with a one-year cliff). Total comp packages combine a competitive USD base salary, a SOL token grant, sometimes equity in Solana Labs itself, plus standard benefits (health, retirement). Senior engineering total comp is benchmarked against top crypto and FAANG offers, but the SOL portion is volatile by definition. Negotiate the SOL grant in token units (not USD-equivalent) and understand the vesting schedule, the strike price or grant price reference, and any lockup or sale restrictions before signing.
Is the company fully remote, hybrid, or in-office?
Solana Labs describes itself as a 'fully distributed team with offices in San Francisco and New York.' In practice, most engineering roles can be done remotely from a US-compatible timezone, though some teams (especially product, mobile, and exec functions) cluster in SF or NYC and prefer hybrid attendance. Roles that require frequent collaboration with the Mobile/Seeker team or executive leadership tend to lean hybrid. Confirm the expectation per role with your recruiter; Foundation roles tend to be more globally distributed than Labs roles.
How long does the interview process take, and what does a typical loop look like?
End-to-end timelines typically run three to six weeks from first recruiter contact to offer, faster for hot roles and senior leaders, slower for niche specialties. A representative engineering loop is: (1) recruiter screen, 30 minutes, motivations and logistics; (2) hiring manager screen, 45 to 60 minutes, technical background and team fit; (3) technical screen, 60 to 90 minutes, coding or systems; (4) on-site loop of four to six interviews covering deep technical, system design, behavioral, values fit, and one cross-functional or executive panel; (5) references and offer. Some teams add a paid trial project or take-home, particularly for staff and principal IC roles.
What does Solana Labs look for that differs from a typical FAANG interview?
Three things stand out. First, conviction in the technical thesis: you must be able to defend why a high-throughput, monolithic L1 wins over modular/rollup architectures, with specifics. Second, evidence of public, on-chain, open-source work: GitHub PRs, deployed programs, validator operations, audit writeups, X/Twitter posts, and SIMDs are first-class signal in a way they are not at FAANG. Third, calm under genuinely adversarial conditions: how you talk about past outages, security incidents, or hostile press cycles matters more than rehearsed STAR stories about 'a time you had a difficult coworker.'
What kinds of roles are most commonly open across the Solana ecosystem?
Across Solana Labs, the Foundation, and the broader ecosystem (Anza, Jito Labs, Phantom, Helius, Jump's Firedancer, Backpack, and hundreds of dApp companies), the most consistently open lanes are: Rust protocol/runtime/validator engineers; distributed systems and performance engineers; security engineers and auditors; smart contract (program) engineers (Rust + Anchor); SDK and developer tooling engineers (TypeScript, Web3.js / Kit); wallet and mobile engineers (Swift, Kotlin, React Native); devrel and developer marketing; ecosystem and BD; and product and design for consumer-facing dApps. Foundation-side roles also include grants program managers, validator relations, and policy/regulatory work.
Does Solana Labs sponsor visas or hire internationally?
Solana Labs has historically supported visa sponsorship for senior roles in San Francisco and New York where the talent gap justifies it, but it is not guaranteed and depends on the role, level, and current immigration climate. Many Foundation and ecosystem roles are remote-friendly and do not require US work authorization, which can be a faster path for international candidates. Always confirm sponsorship status explicitly with the recruiter before investing weeks in a process; do not assume.
How do I stand out if I do not have a traditional CS degree or FAANG background?
The Solana ecosystem is unusually credential-blind and unusually merit-visible. The single most effective move is to ship something public on Solana: a useful program, a well-written audit, a meaningful PR to agave/anza-xyz/anchor, a validator with strong uptime metrics, a developer tool, an analytics dashboard, or a thoughtful SIMD. Pair that with a clear, opinionated post (blog or X thread) explaining what you built and what you learned. Many of the strongest hires in the ecosystem came in through hackathon wins (Solana Hyperdrive/Renaissance/Colosseum), grant-funded projects, or bug bounty leaderboards rather than through a classic resume pipeline.

Open Positions

Solana currently has 11 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 11 open positions at Solana

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