Senior Solana Smart Contract Engineer

Location: Bangalore preferred. Remote within India considered.

About Inco

Inco is building the confidentiality layer for blockchains through advanced encryption and secure-compute technologies.

We’re building the next generation of secure, scalable, and privacy-enhancing infrastructure for Web3, enabling fintech, payments, DeFi, and blockchain applications to have the same confidentiality users and institutions expect from Web2.

Our technology integrates directly with existing blockchain ecosystems, including Solana, to enable private payments, confidential assets, and privacy-preserving financial applications without sacrificing usability or performance.

Who You Are

We’re looking for a Senior Solana Smart Contract Engineer with deep experience building production-grade programs in Rust on Solana.

You have a strong understanding of how Solana works under the hood—from its account model and transaction lifecycle to CPI, PDAs, compute constraints, and program security. You care deeply about correctness, performance, and building systems that can safely handle meaningful value in production.

You have a genuine engineering mindset: you’re curious about how systems work at a low level, investigate root causes instead of applying superficial fixes, and enjoy solving difficult problems around distributed systems, cryptography, performance, and blockchain infrastructure.

You’re comfortable owning a feature or protocol component end-to-end—from architecture and smart contract design through implementation, testing, deployment, security reviews, and production monitoring.

This role is based in India, with Bangalore strongly preferred. For candidates in Bangalore, we value regular in-person collaboration with the team. We are also open to exceptional candidates working remotely within India.

Responsibilities

Solana Program Development

• Design, build, test, and maintain production-grade Solana programs in Rust.
• Architect onchain systems using Solana primitives including PDAs, CPIs, account models, token programs, and transaction composition.
• Build integrations with the broader Solana ecosystem, including wallets, DeFi protocols, token infrastructure, and other onchain applications.
• Optimize programs for compute units, transaction size, account access, latency, and cost.
• Own smart contract features from technical design through deployment and production operation.

Protocol & Systems Engineering

• Work on protocol components at the intersection of Solana, privacy, payments, and secure computation.
• Design interfaces between onchain programs and offchain infrastructure.
• Reason carefully about trust assumptions, failure modes, concurrency, state management, and distributed system behavior.
• Contribute to architecture decisions as Inco expands its privacy infrastructure across Solana and other blockchain ecosystems.

Security & Correctness

• Build systems where security and correctness are critical.
• Identify potential vulnerabilities including authorization issues, account validation bugs, signer assumptions, CPI vulnerabilities, economic attacks, and state inconsistencies.
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, fuzz, and adversarial tests.
• Work with internal engineers and external auditors to identify and remediate security issues.
• Maintain a high bar for code quality, review, and documentation.

Leadership & Ownership

• Take ownership of major protocol components and technical initiatives.
• Lead technical design discussions and code reviews.
• Help establish engineering best practices for Solana development.
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Collaborate closely with protocol, backend, infrastructure, product, and research teams.
  
  

Required Experience

• 4+ years of software engineering experience, with strong production experience in Rust.
• Significant hands-on experience building Solana programs / smart contracts.
• Strong understanding of Solana's:
  • Account model and runtime
  • PDAs and signer authorization
  • Cross-Program Invocations (CPI)
  • SPL Token and Token Extensions
  • Transaction lifecycle and account locking
  • Compute and transaction constraints
• Experience deploying and maintaining smart contracts or protocols handling real users or meaningful onchain value.
• Strong knowledge of smart contract security and adversarial thinking.
• Strong debugging and performance-optimization skills.
• Experience writing robust automated and integration tests.
• Ability to independently own complex technical projects from architecture to production.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving startup environment with significant ownership and ambiguity.
• Based in India.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with Anchor as well as native Solana program development.
• Experience building or contributing to major Solana DeFi, payments, wallet, trading, infrastructure, or token protocols.
• Experience with smart contract audits or security reviews.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving protocols.
• Experience building offchain infrastructure that interacts with Solana programs.
• Experience with Ethereum or other smart contract ecosystems.
• Open-source contributions to Solana, Rust, cryptography, or blockchain infrastructure projects.
• Previous experience at an early-stage startup or building a protocol from the ground up.
  
  

What We Value

We care less about credentials and more about whether you can build.

The strongest candidates will have shipped meaningful Solana code, understand the protocol beyond the framework abstraction, and can reason carefully about security, performance, and system design.

If you enjoy digging into difficult blockchain infrastructure problems and want to help build privacy infrastructure that can become a core part of the Solana ecosystem, we’d love to hear from you.