Storage Software Engineer

Quick Facts

• Team: AccountsDB (custom storage engine for the Solana validator)
• Focus: Storage performance, reliability, and correctness of account state

Description

You will develop and optimize the storage engine behind AccountsDB, which stores, indexes, and serves every account on Solana. The work targets better throughput and latency while reducing memory and disk usage, write amplification, and improving snapshot/startup performance. You will also ensure correctness across forks and crash recovery through robust testing and validation.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize AccountsDB storage paths (account file layout, account index, read/write caching)
• Reduce memory and disk footprint as account state grows
• Improve flushing, cleaning, shrinking, and purging to keep resource usage predictable
• Optimize snapshot generation/loading and index generation to shorten startup and catch-up times
• Ensure account state correctness across forks, rooting, and crash recovery
• Build and run comprehensive tests (stress tests, fault injection, performance benchmarking)
• Collaborate with runtime, block production, and core protocol engineers and other client teams
• Maintain documentation and conduct peer code reviews

Requirements

• 3+ years architecting data stores, file systems, databases, or high-throughput storage systems
• Proficiency in Rust, C, or C++
• Deep knowledge of low-level storage mechanics (memory-mapped files, page caching, index structures, on-disk formats, garbage collection)
• Advanced understanding of kernel-level and hardware I/O pipelines, including buffered vs direct I/O and io_uring
• Strong knowledge of Linux kernel scheduling, page management, and custom memory allocators
• Experience building concurrent systems, including lock overhead and lock-free structures
• Strong ability to profile and optimize for CPU cache efficiency and memory/CPU hardware behavior
• Ability to debug complex systems and isolate performance bottlenecks
• Clear collaboration skills for cross-functional engineering work

Benefits

• Fast-paced environment focused on innovation and solving hard engineering problems
• Direct impact on security and scalability of blockchain infrastructure and decentralized applications
• Opportunity to help build next-generation Solana storage and protocol performance