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.
