Senior Systems Engineer - Performance
Jito Labs
Software Engineering
United States
USD 200k-230k / year + Equity
Posted on Dec 25, 2025
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
200000 - 230000 USD 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