Systems Engineer, Transaction Landing

Temporal · New York City (preferred) or US Remote · Full-time About Temporal Temporal builds low-latency infrastructure at the core of Solana. We operate across transaction landing, validator infrastructure, and proprietary trading systems. Our flagship product is Nozomi, for transaction landing. This is not a middleware or dashboard role. We work close to the metal: networking, scheduling, memory layout, validator clients, and production trading infrastructure. The role We are hiring a systems engineer to own our transaction landing service end to end. The backend, the networking, and the infrastructure it runs on. A customer hands us a transaction. We get it into a block as fast and as reliably as physically possible. Everything between those two points would be yours. You would be the primary owner of that surface, not a contributor to it: the person accountable for its latency, its correctness, and its uptime. The request path is written by hand rather than assembled from a general-purpose async stack, because the frameworks cost more microseconds than we are willing to spend. Underneath it sits a dispatch layer that decides how to get each transaction in front of the right validator in time, on a budget measured in microseconds. All of it runs on bare metal across many regions. This role is for someone who wants a large, real system to own outright, and who gets uncomfortable when they cannot explain a p99 down to the syscall. Years of experience matter less than slope: what we care about is taste, speed, ownership, and the ability to become dangerous in a complex codebase quickly. What you will do Own the service end to end: backend, networking, and infrastructure, through design, implementation, deployment, operation, and on-call. Cut latency and raise landing rates on paths where the difference between good and great is measured in microseconds. Profile and optimize across the full stack: syscall behavior, memory layout, cache effects, lock-free data structures, allocator behavior, queue design, CPU scheduling, NUMA, packet budgets, and tail latency. Improve the network path between our infrastructure and validators, including placement, peering, routing, and transport choice. Operate a global bare-metal fleet: provisioning, deploys, pinning and isolation, kernel and NIC tuning, capacity, and the tooling that makes all of it repeatable. Build the observability to know, per transaction, where the time went and why something did not land. Those numbers drive customer reporting and billing, so they have to be right. Own correctness where it touches money: deduplication, revert protection, fee and tip accounting, and reconciliation against chain state. Investigate production incidents where the answer may involve kernel behavior, packet drops, a NIC queue, lock contention, a validator's own behavior, or a Solana runtime edge case. What we are looking for Exceptional Rust. You are comfortable in unsafe code when it is warranted, you know what the compiler is doing, and you can reason about ownership, allocation, and atomics without hand-waving. Equivalent depth in C or C++ with real Rust intent is fine. Fluency with low-level primitives: syscalls, epoll and io_uring, sockets and socket options, batched send and receive, shared memory, lock-free queues, atomics and memory ordering, cache lines and false sharing, CPU pinning, and NUMA. Real experience building or optimizing low-latency, high-throughput production systems where tail latency was the metric that mattered. Deep Linux performance skill: perf, eBPF, flamegraphs, hardware counters, packet captures, and tracing, plus the judgment to know which one answers the question in front of you. Networking depth: UDP and QUIC behavior, TCP and TLS internals, kernel bypass, NIC and driver behavior, routing, and how packets actually move between datacenters. Comfort operating infrastructure, not just writing services. Bare metal, systemd, configuration management, deploys, and being the person paged when it breaks. Strong ownership: you can take an underspecified production problem, investigate it, build the fix, ship it, and operate it. Especially relevant: HFT or market-making infrastructure such as feed handlers, order gateways, and colocation; kernel bypass and fast-path networking including AF_XDP, DPDK, io_uring, RDMA, or Solarflare and Mellanox stacks; HPC, distributed databases, storage engines, schedulers, compilers, runtimes, or operating systems; validator clients, Solana internals, transaction propagation, or MEV; SRE work for latency-sensitive bare-metal fleets. You do not need years of blockchain experience, a crypto background, a specific degree, or years of seniority. Exceptional early-career engineers with the right fundamentals and hunger are encouraged to apply. We are happy to talk to engineers from HFT, infra, databases, kernels, compilers, trading systems, HPC, and networking. How we work Temporal is small, technical, and fast-moving. Engineers own real systems, not tickets. High autonomy, high accountability, direct access to production, minimal process. We use AI tools daily and expect you to as well. Location and compensation Location: New York City strongly preferred. We will consider fully remote candidates living in the United States who are exceptional fits. Base salary range: $200,000 to $350,000, depending on experience and level. In addition to base salary, all roles may be eligible for equity and performance-based upside. Base is only part of total compensation here, and compensation scales quickly with demonstrated impact. For exceptional candidates, we have the budget to be competitive with top trading firms; the posted range reflects base salary at hire, not the ceiling of what a career here looks like. Benefits: Comprehensive benefits package including 100% employer-paid health, dental, and vision insurance; paid time off; a technology stipend; 401(k); and an annual discretionary bonus, which may include stock options. Equal Opportunity Employer: We are committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, caregiver status, citizenship or immigration status, veteran or military status, arrest or conviction record (where protected by law), or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, New York State, or New York City law. We evaluate candidates on ability and evidence of work, and we welcome people with non-traditional backgrounds. Temporal is an equal opportunity employer. #J-18808-Ljbffr SOLANA FOUNDATION