Protocol Research Engineer

Raiku • Full-time • Remote (Remote) • 11m ago

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.