Senior Protocol & Product Engineer
Perena
WorldwideremotePosted 6 days ago
Skill Required
Protocol-EngineerProduct-EngineerBlockchain-EngineerDeFi-EngineerBackend-EngineerSenior-Protocol-Security-EngineerProtocol-Design-EngineerSenior-DeFi-Protocol-EngineerSenior-Product-EngineerSenior-Product-EngineeringBlockchain-Protocol-EngineerSystem DesignBlockchainsecuritybuildingfintechSolanadesignRailsRustDeFiandEthereumFulltime
Key highlights
- Required experience: 3+ years in financial systems
- Key requirement: Experience with EVM
- Notable requirement: Strong smart-contract and backend/infrastructure fundamentals
- Key benefit: Opportunity to build institutional-grade DeFi on Solana
Role overview
Perena is a decentralized financial protocol on Solana offering USD STAR (USD*), a fully collateralized, yield-bearing digital dollar. The protocol manages a diversified portfolio of yield-generating assets, including delta-neutral hedged positions, secured borrow-lend market positions, and real-world assets, with the goal of building a full suite of on-chain stablebanking products. Founded by a team with TradFi and DeFi backgrounds and backed by prominent investors and Solana co-founders, Perena focuses on creating a sustainable, risk-managed financial experience for transacting, saving, and investing on-chain.
Responsibilities
- Turn ambiguous product ideas into well-designed, production-ready systems.
- Challenge requirements, make sound architectural decisions, write the technical plan, and deliver quickly with limited supervision.
- Design flow-of-funds orchestration across venues and chains — bridging, routing, rebalancing between custodial and non-custodial systems — with reliable settlement, reconciliation, and failure handling as first-class concerns
- Develop custody and key management patterns that meet institutional-grade security requirements across custodial and non-custodial environments
- Build on-chain settlement and payment flows, including integrations with DEXs, lending markets, custodians, and bridge infrastructure — starting on Solana (Rust) and extending across EVM and other chains as we scale
- Build and maintain the systems that move Perena's money: minting/redeeming USD*, allocating collateral, and routing capital between on-chain protocols, centralized custodians/exchanges, and partner bank rails
Requirements
- 3+ years building financial systems where correctness and settlement guarantees are non-negotiable — payment rails, custody/settlement infrastructure, or trading systems
- Built and shipped a DeFi, fintech, trading, or infrastructure product in a small team.
- Has owned meaningful systems from design through production.
- Strong smart-contract and backend/infrastructure fundamentals.
- Experience with EVM
- Understands vaults, asset management, yield products, or onchain financial primitives.
- Familiar with institutional concerns such as custody, permissions, compliance integrations, accounting, and operational controls.
- Product-minded: Begins with the user, business objective, and operating constraints (not just the requested implementation)
- High agency: Identifies gaps, proposes solutions, and keeps moving without waiting for granular direction.
- Bias for action: can take a half-formed spec and run with it, iterating quickly rather than waiting for full direction.
- Architecturally credible: Someone whose judgment on system design can be trusted with minimal oversight.
- Constructively challenging: Pushes back when requirements are unclear, risky, or cannot meet a proposed timeframe.
- Clear communicator: Produces concise technical specifications before significant implementation
Nice to have
- Solana experience is valuable.
- Ideally a former founder or early engineer—even if the company or protocol ultimately failed.
- Comfortable working directly with founders and translating commercial opportunities into scoped products.
Benefits
- Opportunity to work on a once-in-a-generation shift from legacy money to programmable, accessible, internet-native finance.
- Culture of trust and initiative where voices are heard and outcomes matter.
- Commitment to work as craft: thoughtful, opinionated, and precise.
- First-principles approach to reimagining financial infrastructure.
- Transparent environment that values working in public, clarity, writing, and sharing progress openly.
Additional details
- Perena is backed by Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal
- Investors include Citadel, Jane Street, IMC, Susquehanna, Borderless Capital, Binance Labs, Primitive Ventures, Maelstrom, Anagram, Breed, and others
- Perena was a sponsor of the Colosseum Hackathon Stablecoin Track
- Community spans over 20,000 developers, users, and builders
- Earlier in your career? Apply anyway if you can show real campaign ownership, sharp writing, and a clear point of view on the market.
- Originally posted on Himalayas