Staking Operations Lead

Who We Are

The Solana Foundation is a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, dedicated to the adoption, decentralization, and security of the Solana network. Solana is a high performance blockchain that can deliver a fast and friendly user experience, without sacrificing security. The Solana Foundation is working to realize a world where individuals own their data, use permissionless networks, and transfer information and value freely around the world. We are looking for talented people who are willing to jump right in and use their expertise to help the ecosystem build.

The Opportunity

The network is the core to everything we do at Solana Foundation. This role will play a pivotal part in promoting network health, decentralization, and maintaining censorship resistance on Solana. You will be required to understand the current staking ecosystem and how to strategically deploy stake to improve network health. You will support the Solana Foundation’s relationships with the validator community, stakepools, and custodians while advocating for stakers on Solana.

Finally, this role should be a ruthless advocate of decentralization and censorship resistance. You should understand and monitor the ever-shifting human, economic and technical layout of the Solana network, identifying weaker points along the multiple axes of decentralization, and propose and implement solutions both within the Foundation’s own staking strategies as well as in the broader community. This is a multi-faceted role that has elements of program management, long-term strategy setting, technical execution, financial analysis and community and institutional communications.

To be successful in this role

A successful candidate must have a very strong understanding of the economic and technical fundamentals of consensus staking on Proof of Stake blockchains, ideally Solana. The candidate should have a firm grasp on the potentially conflicting interests of stakers and validators.

You ideally have:

• Technical experience in validator operations.

• Understanding of protocol governance

• Comfortable using Linux or similar CLI driven operating systems.

• Experience using scripting languages such as Python, Bash or similar to build tools to analyze datasets, or to quickly assess the state of the network.

• Ability to extract the story from the data.

• Excellent written/spoken communication skills. Ability and enthusiasm to explain/pitch/sell/defend your proposed strategies to a diverse audience. Ability to explain complex topics in accessible language.