Principal Security Engineer (Solana)

OpenZeppelin is the security backbone for onchain finance, trusted by leading institutions like DTCC, Fidelity, Coinbase, and major protocols including Uniswap and Aave. Since 2015, the company has become the standard for securing digital assets, with its libraries protecting over $35 trillion in onchain value. OpenZeppelin combines AI-native security tooling with deep research and a decade of audit expertise to guide teams through the full secure development lifecycle.

The Secure Development team sits at the intersection of building and breaking, designing and hardening production-grade libraries and smart contracts across multiple blockchains. The team operates as fully AI-native engineers, using cutting-edge internal tooling to amplify effectiveness across every phase of secure development. This role is for someone ready to define what OpenZeppelin's Solana practice looks like—your reputation will compound with theirs.

What you'll do

• Lead Solana workstreams end to end, from architecture and implementation through audit preparation, deployment and post-launch hardening, making the technical calls and bringing the team along with you.

• Build production-grade programs and libraries where security is the primary design constraint, knowing your work will be reviewed by world-class auditors.

• Own the hard design questions unique to the Solana ecosystem: storage and compute cost models, upgradability and governance patterns, and idiomatic approaches for primitives without precedent.

• Manage client-facing roadmap and design discussions independently, serving as the technical voice that clients want to debate with and learn from.

• Raise the bar across the team by reviewing Solana work, setting standards, and accelerating the ramp for incoming engineers.

• Represent OpenZeppelin in the ecosystem through engagement with the Solana Foundation, core teams, standards discussions, publishing, and open source contributions.

• Build agents, skills and workflows that multiply team leverage using AI as a daily core tool.

• Partner with blockchain security researchers on cross-team research and protocol-level threat analysis.

What you'll bring

• 3+ years shipping production Solana programs that others depend on and can verify.

• Proven ability to lead multi-quarter technical workstreams from architecture through shipping, making consequential calls and carrying them through disagreement and review.

• Deep SVM fluency covering the account model, program derived addresses, cross-program invocation, compute budgeting, rent, account lifecycle, versioned transactions, address lookup tables, and program upgradability implications.

• Contributions to Solana standards through Improvement Documents, SPL and Token 2022 extensions, or the Wallet Standard.

• Experience collaborating with foundation or core protocol teams on deliverables adopted as standards.

• Productive work in Anchor with equally strong ability to work directly against the runtime when needed, understanding the cost of each choice.

• Security-first mindset across every line of code, backed by demonstrable experience auditing, breaking or hardening production systems.

• AI-native workflow using Claude Code, Cursor or equivalent as your daily driver.

Nice to have

• Experience with fully homomorphic encryption or confidential computing primitives.

• Published research or technical writing on Solana protocol design.

What we offer

• Remote work, anywhere in the world.

• The opportunity to shape an emerging ecosystem and define OpenZeppelin's Solana direction under your own name.