VDEX is a fast-growing DeFi startup focused on building a decentralized perpetual exchange. VDEX is backed by Binance Labs and Gate Exchange and passed $10 million in volume last month.

Powered by Virtual Rollups, the VDEX architecture is designed to overcome the performance and cost limitations of traditional blockchain systems by allowing the users to trade with instant finality, ZeroGas fees and omnichain (trade among different chains without requiring any bridge).

VDEX offers competitive salary and generous equity/token.

Level: Mid to Senior

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with senior developers and blockchain engineers to design and develop backend services in Golang for our DeFi platform and improve our frontend in Typescript.
• Maintain and improve existing backend, frontend, and our smart contracts on EVM chains.
• Write clean, efficient, and well-documented code.
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to improving engineering practices.
• Support integration with new features and DeFi protocols.

Requirements

• Solid programming skills in Golang (Go) and Typescript, or willing to learn.
• Understanding of blockchain fundamentals and DeFi concepts like EVM, tokens, yields.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including designing APIs, services, and distributed systems with a focus on reliability and performance.
• Clean code principles: writes well-structured, readable, and testable code, adheres to SOLID principles and practices good software design patterns.
• Previous experience in remote first team, or ability to work independently in a remote-first team.
• Knowledge of basic cryptographic principles and key management.
• Comfortable using Git, Docker, AWS and CI/CD tools.
• Good communication and collaboration skills.
• Self-starter mindset and willingness to learn fast.

Nice to Have

• Understanding of traditional finance concepts like order books, perpetuals and trading concepts.
• Ability to reason in mathematical terms and provide formal arguments of correctness and security of a system.
• Experience working with smart contracts (Solidity).
• Familiarity with Ethereum and etherjs library.
• Contributions to other open-source projects or previous work in DeFi and crypto.
• Understanding of performance tuning, observability, and distributed tracing in backend systems.

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.

Why Join Raiku?

Raiku is building a high-performance execution layer atop Solana that enables guaranteed transaction inclusion, pre-confirmations, and slot-level coordination — unlocking a new design space for ultra-reliable onchain apps. We’re backed by leading investors, deeply technical, and shipping fast.

• Work with a world-class engineering team building core infrastructure from first principles.
• Help define the next evolution of block production and validator coordination on Solana.
• Remote-first, async culture optimized for focus, ownership, and velocity.
• Competitive salary + meaningful token upside.
• Home office and workstation setup stipend.

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