Senior Backend Engineer - Solana Mobile

Solana Labs

11d•Remote

About The Position

Solana Mobile is building the mobile platform for digital assets on Solana. We recently launched Seeker, a digital asset–first phone featuring Seed Vault, a hardware-backed security system for wallets, along with our own wallet and the dApp Store, a mobile distribution platform for apps built by the ecosystem of Solana developers, and the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS), which enables phone manufacturers to deliver these products on their own devices. We don't just provide infrastructure. We build the full stack across hardware, software, and platform services to deliver seamless, secure, and performant digital asset experiences on mobile. Our backend systems power the dApp Store, wallet services, event tracking, both on-chain and within apps, on-chain transaction systems such as staking, and the APIs that developers and users rely on every day. We're a lean, high-agency team. Engineers here own real scope: there's no large org to absorb the slack, and the decisions you make show up directly in the product. That also means we move fast and expect people to operate with a high degree of autonomy. We actively lean into AI-assisted development as a way to keep overhead low and give every engineer more leverage. That's not specific to any one role, it's how we work. We expect engineers to experiment with AI tools, integrate them into their own workflows, and share what works. A lot of what makes us effective is how we work, and there's meaningful room to improve. If you write solid backend systems, take ownership seriously, and want to work in an environment where your contributions have a real impact, this is it.

Requirements

5+ years of professional backend engineering, with a track record of owning and operating production services
High ownership: you take problems end-to-end and drive them to resolution without waiting for direction
Proactive by default: you identify issues early, propose solutions, and move quickly
You already use AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as part of how you work: not as a novelty, but because they make you faster and you've figured out when to trust them
Strong proficiency in TypeScript/Node.js and/or Rust — idiomatic, well-tested, production-grade code
Solid command of PostgreSQL: schema design, query optimization, indexing, migration discipline
Good working knowledge of Redis: caching patterns, pub/sub, TTL strategies
Hands-on AWS experience: ECS, RDS, SQS, S3, Lambda — comfortable deploying and operating services in a cloud environment
Sound understanding of distributed systems: idempotency, eventual consistency, fault tolerance, graceful degradation
Security-aware: secrets management (AWS Secrets Manager / SSM), API auth patterns (JWT, OAuth2), OWASP hygiene
Comfortable with Docker and containerized deployments

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with the Solana ecosystem: RPC node interaction, on-chain program invocation, SPL tokens, wallet adapter patterns, or indexer design
Experience working closely with external developers or ecosystem partners: debugging integrations, reviewing SDK usage, or shaping APIs based on real developer feedback
You've built small automation scripts, internal tooling, or LLM-integrated workflows that saved real time, for yourself or your team
Experience building backends for mobile-native products (push notifications, storefront APIs, device attestation, background job orchestration)
Contributions to open-source backend libraries, developer tooling, or the Solana ecosystem
Prior experience in a senior or tech lead capacity: driving cross-team alignment, writing technical specs, owning a domain end-to-end

Responsibilities

Design and own backend architecture for core Solana Mobile services: dApp Store APIs, wallet services backend, device registry, event tracking, and on-chain activity systems (staking and related infrastructure)
Build and maintain REST and WebSocket APIs consumed by Android, Flutter, and Web clients, as well as third-party developers integrating the Solana Mobile Stack
Own your services in production: participate in on-call rotation, author runbooks, contribute to post-mortems, and close the loop on action items
Look for friction in your own work and in the team's processes: automate what makes sense, build small tools that save repeated effort, and share what you build
Contribute to CI/CD reliability and build infrastructure (GitHub Actions, WarpBuild) with a sharp eye on pipeline speed, cost, and reproducibility
Conduct thorough code reviews, contribute to technical discussions, initiate RFC discussions for significant changes, and help the team get better over time
Drive infrastructure decisions on AWS (ECS, RDS, Lambda, SQS, CloudFront) — from architecture through to cost-conscious production operation
Own the observability stack: structured logging (Loki), metrics and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana Unified Alerting), distributed tracing, and incident response runbooks
Contribute to backend architecture for device attestation and the Seed Vault integration layer, including on-chain verification flows (Squads Protocol multisig, SPL token operations)
Collaborate with mobile engineers (Android/Kotlin, Flutter/Dart) to design mobile-first API patterns — offline resilience, background sync, efficient payloads for constrained networks
Work closely with Protocol Engineers, building Solana programs to design off-chain services that compose cleanly with on-chain logic