Protocol Research Engineer

About the Role

As a Protocol Research Engineer at Raiku, you’ll dive deep into Solana’s consensus mechanisms, validator dynamics, and block-building edge cases to help push the boundaries of what’s possible on-chain. Your work will directly inform and evolve Raiku’s infrastructure — including ahead-of-time auctions, deterministic inclusion, and decentralized execution environments.

This role is ideal for an engineer who obsesses over protocol-level behavior, from slashing conditions and fork choice rules to novel token incentive structures and inclusion guarantees. You will collaborate closely with our core engineering team, lead technical research deep-dives, and shape future SIMD proposals and Raiku-native designs.

Core Responsibilities

Protocol Research & Development

• Analyze Solana protocol changes (SIMDs) and model their impact on consensus, block production, and validator incentives.
• Explore alternative leader schedules, transaction scheduling policies, and failure recovery mechanisms.
• Design and prototype changes to Raiku’s validator sidecar, ackermann-node, and execution environment logic.

Incentives & Economics

• Simulate and reason about token-level economics (e.g. fee markets, slot auctions, stake redistribution) in the context of Raiku’s architecture.
• Collaborate with the team on reward structures that align validators, apps, and execution primitives.
• Contribute to internal tooling for simulating validator behavior under new fee models or coordination layers.

Research & Thought Leadership

• Write internal memos and public-facing research exploring protocol edge cases, inclusion determinism, and priority fee market design.
• Lead technical discussions and workshops across the team and ecosystem partners.
• Represent Raiku in upstream governance and protocol forums (e.g., GitHub SIMDs, community calls).

What We’re Looking For

• Deep understanding of Solana’s architecture, consensus algorithm (Tower BFT), and validator mechanics.
• Proficiency in systems programming (Rust or C++) and experience working with validator or node clients (Agave, Jito, etc.).
• Comfort reasoning about distributed systems, forks, slashing, transaction lifecycle, and fee markets.
• Demonstrated ability to write clear, technical research — either internal design docs or public content.
• A rigorous, systems-level thinker who thrives in ambiguity and wants to help shape the frontier of internet-scale consensus.

Bonus Points

• Experience contributing to SIMD proposals or L1 protocol development (Solana, Cosmos, Ethereum, etc.).
• Familiarity with execution environments (SVM, EVM, Move) or decentralized scheduling infrastructure.
• Interest in MEV mitigation, slot auctions, or validator tokenomics.
• Past experience in distributed systems research, zero-knowledge design, or compiler/runtime engineering.

Why Join Raiku?

Raiku is building a high-performance execution layer atop Solana that enables guaranteed transaction inclusion, pre-confirmations, and slot-level coordination — unlocking a new design space for ultra-reliable onchain apps. We’re backed by leading investors, deeply technical, and shipping fast.

• Work with a world-class engineering team building core infrastructure from first principles.
• Help define the next evolution of block production and validator coordination on Solana.
• Remote-first, async culture optimized for focus, ownership, and velocity.
• Competitive salary + meaningful token upside.
• Home office and workstation setup stipend.