Senior Systems Engineer - Performance

Senior Systems Engineer - Performance

Location: USA Department: Engineering Workplace Type: Remote

About Jito Labs

Jito Labs is architecting the future of high-performance distributed systems on Solana. We're the team behind Jito-Solana, the leading MEV Solana client, and the Jito Block Engine, which has revolutionized block building on Solana. The Block-Engine has generated roughly 4.5 million SOL for validators and stakers over the past year.

Our latest product, BAM, reimagines Solana market structure and the transaction supply chain with a heavy emphasis on performance, reliability, and transaction privacy. We're looking for a senior systems engineer with strong Linux systems and low-level performance experience who enjoys working at the boundary between software, operating systems, and hardware.

Why Jito

We're a small, profitable company with product-market fit. That means:

• High ownership: You drive significant technical decisions and shape product direction
• Fast execution: We ship rapidly and iterate on real-world feedback
• Technical excellence: Complex problems, elegant solutions
• Sustainable: Strong financials let us focus on long-term impact, not runway

About the Position

We are seeking an exceptional Senior Systems Engineer to join our core team building critical, next-generation infrastructure for the Solana ecosystem. You'll be exploring uncharted technical territory and building novel solutions across our stack.

Systems & Infrastructure Engineering

• Build and operate high-performance Linux systems for transaction processing and block building
• Work with virtualization and isolation technologies (KVM, QEMU, TEEs)
• Debug and optimize interactions between user-space systems and the Linux kernel
• Reason about CPU performance, memory, I/O, and scheduling under real-world load

Performance Engineering

• Build high-performance systems for processing and analyzing on-chain data
• Optimize critical paths in our infrastructure and Solana core (Agave & Firedancer) to reduce latency and increase throughput
• Develop new tools for monitoring and improving network efficiency
• Improve system reliability through careful design, observability, and fault isolation
• Contribute performance improvements upstream (Solana / OS / QEMU related components)

Requirements

• 5+ years of systems-level programming in C, C++, or Rust (we use Rust)
• Deep experience with Linux systems engineering and performance-critical infrastructure
• Proficiency with profiling and tracing tools: perf, flamegraphs, eBPF
• Experience debugging network performance (tcpdump, Wireshark, packet capture analysis)
• Familiarity with CPU microarchitecture concerns (cache behavior, branch prediction, NUMA)
• Willingness to dive into complicated systems to accurately root cause and fix issues
• Clear, simple communication

Strong Plus

• HFT, market-making, or ultra-low-latency trading systems experience
• Virtualization / hypervisors / TEE development
• Kernel-adjacent or embedded systems work
• Solana or blockchain infrastructure experience

Compensation & Benefits

Salary Range: $200,000 - $230,000 a year

• Salary based on experience
• Above market compensation and multiple forms of equity
• 100% employer paid health benefits
• All-expenses-paid team retreats and conferences
• Weekly meal voucher

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