Technical Operations Engineer, Solana

QuickNode is a cloud-based infrastructure company that powers the blockchain ecosystem.

We are a global remote company with an HQ in Miami, Florida.

**The Role**:
We’re seeking a dedicated Technical Operations Engineer specializing in Solana infrastructure to ensure the reliability, scalability, and exceptional performance of our Solana-based services. In this role, you'll leverage specialized knowledge of Solana to manage, optimize, and enhance our validator nodes, RPC deployments, and related infrastructure. Your contributions will directly impact QuickNode's operational excellence and customer trust by proactively addressing issues, refining processes, and collaborating closely with foundational teams and the broader Solana ecosystem.

**What You’ll Do**:

- _ Solana Network Leadership_: Lead end-to-end deployment and optimization projects for Solana infrastructure, including validator nodes, RPC endpoints, and indexing services. Drive design reviews, canary rollouts, and continuous improvements to performance and reliability.
- _ High-Severity Incident Command_: Own SEV 0/1 response, coordinating mitigation across Teams, running postmortems, and ensuring root-cause resolution with follow-through on corrective actions.
- _ SLO Ownership & Capacity Strategy_: Define and manage service-level objectives (SLOs) and SLAs. Build and maintain cost models and capacity planning tools to forecast infrastructure needs and control spend.
- _ Monitoring & Proactive Issue Detection_: Develop dashboards and alerting solutions using tools like Grafana and DataDog. Identify anomalies and trends to prevent outages before they occur.
- _ Automation & Infra as Code_: Implement and maintain automation via Ansible, Terraform, and Kubernetes. Reduce toil, accelerate deployment timelines, and ensure consistent environments across staging and production.
- _ Mentorship & Peer Review_: Provide mentorship to engineers on deployment, observability, and Solana-specific ops. Review infrastructure code and monitoring configs. Raise the bar through shared knowledge.
- _ Solana Ecosystem Engagement_: Act as a technical representative in Solana forums and community calls. Collaborate directly with the Solana Foundation and ecosystem contributors to troubleshoot and evolve protocol-level operations.
- _ Cross-Team Collaboration_: Partner with internal infrastructure, platform, and support Teams to solve customer-impacting issues. Contribute insights to architectural and product-level discussions.
- _ 24/7 On-Call Participation_: Participate in an on-call rotation, ensuring 24/7 availability for critical systems and supporting rapid incident resolution.

**What You’ll Bring**:

- Minimum of 5+ years in Technical Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or related roles, with proven Linux/Unix system administration and advanced troubleshooting capabilities. Holding an RHCE-level Linux or similar certification would be beneficial.
- Hands-on experience operating and optimizing Solana validator nodes, RPC endpoints, and associated infrastructure at scale. Must be familiar with high-level Solana protocol and core components. Proficient in analyzing validator logs, RPC debugging, and addressing Solana-specific operational issues. Contributions into open-source Solana projects is an asset.
- Solid hands-on experience with configuration management and infrastructure automation tools (Helm, Terraform, Ansible, Consul), including containerization expertise (Docker, Kubernetes), managing and scaling services in cloud environments.
- Competency in scripting/programming languages (Rust, Go, JavaScript).
- Advanced proficiency in monitoring and analytics platforms (Grafana, DataDog), enabling proactive and data-driven operational decision-making.
- Demonstrated ability to identify performance patterns, forecast potential issues, and implement preventive solutions.
- Strong track record defining, measuring, and maintaining SLAs/SLOs, and experienced with incident response tooling and processes (PagerDuty), ensuring quick resolution and systematic root-cause analyses.
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, with a proven ability to collaborate effectively across multiple teams and stakeholders.
- Self-motivated, solution-oriented, and consistently striving for operational improvements, quality enhancements, and reduced technical debt.
- Solid professional attributes, committed to transparency, accountability, and ethical behavior. Capable of managing complexity and staying adaptable under pressure, and able to demonstrate continuous learning and comfort evolving within a rapidly changing technical landscape.
- Self-starter driven by curiosity and initiative, proactively identifying opportunities, addressing gaps, and implementing solutions autonomously.
- Thrives in dynamic environments and committed to maintaining industry leadership through close collaboration with the most innovative and talented minds in Web3.

The QuickNode co