Research Engineer

• Company: Temporal
• Location: New York, NY, USA
• Sector: Blockchain
• Source: web3.career

Temporal · New York City (preferred) or Global 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. We see a lot of what happens on Solana before it lands. Understanding what that flow is worth, who is competing for it, and how to price and protect it is its own discipline. That is this role.

The role

We are hiring a senior MEV research engineer to own how we understand and act on MEV.

You will work on top of the on-chain data we already index, and build the pipelines that do not exist yet, to answer questions about extraction, ordering, and value on Solana. Then you turn those answers into product: better MEV protection on Nozomi, better auction mechanics, and better decisions about which flow is worth what.

A large part of this is owning our internal searcher intelligence: the pipelines, models, and interfaces that tell us what every searcher trading our flow did, what it earned, and where value is leaking. Those numbers get read by the searchers themselves and they feed commercial conversations, so they have to survive being argued with. When someone disputes one, the honest first move is to check it against chain rather than defend it.

You will also run the searcher side of our order flow auction. That means talking to the people bidding into it, understanding what they need, feeding that back into product, and knowing enough about their business to be taken seriously. Searchers can tell within about five minutes whether the person on the other side of the call actually understands MEV.

This is not a research role in the publish-a-paper sense, and it is not a BD role with a SQL course attached. The analysis has to be right, and it has to turn into something we ship.

What you will do

Own the data pipelines behind our MEV and searcher analytics end to end: extraction, modeling, incremental recompute, serving, and the interfaces on top.

Build and extend classification for MEV on Solana: sandwiches, backruns, arbitrage, liquidations, ordering behavior, and whatever the next pattern turns out to be.

Design attribution. Who won a given opportunity, whose flow it came from, how much was extracted, and how confident we actually are in each answer.

Quantify extraction against our own flow, improve MEV protection on Nozomi using evidence rather than intuition, then measure whether the change worked.

Monitor searcher behavior on the network and inside our auction, and design the rules that separate real problems from benign patterns.

Produce the economics: what a searcher earned, what it cost them, what was rebated, and the numbers underneath revenue share.

Own developer relations with our searcher network: onboarding, documentation, debugging their integrations, and being the person they message when something is off.

Work in SQL on ClickHouse day to day, and in Rust on the pipelines and services underneath it.

What we are looking for

Real MEV fluency. You understand searching, ordering, auctions, and extraction well enough to hold a conversation with someone who does it for a living.

Strong analytical ability on large datasets. SQL is not the constraint, and neither is data volume. You own pipelines rather than only query them.

Deep familiarity with Solana, or the demonstrated ability to build genuine protocol fluency fast: accounts, transaction structure, instructions and CPIs, execution, and block structure.

Proficiency in Rust, or strong systems-language experience and the intent to work in Rust daily. Our pipelines and services are Rust, and you will be changing them rather than filing tickets against them.

Grain discipline. You know what one row means before you sum a column, and you have been burned once by counting the same money twice.

Skepticism toward your own work. When a number looks wrong you check it against an independent source rather than against the pipeline that produced it. You would rather publish nothing than publish a plausible zero.

Comfort talking to sophisticated external users who will notice if you are bluffing, and being wrong in front of them without getting defensive.

Especially relevant: searching, or building infrastructure for searchers; MEV research at a protocol, builder, relay, or research group; on-chain data work such as indexers, decoders, or analytics platforms; quant research or market microstructure work in crypto or traditional markets; trade surveillance or market abuse detection; revenue assurance, settlement, or clearing; auction and mechanism design; developer relations or solutions engineering where the users were engineers.

You do not need to have been a searcher, though it helps. You do not need a specific degree, distributed systems expertise, or to check every box.

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 who are exceptional fits.

Base salary range: $200,000 to $250,000, 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.