Release Engineer
About Jito
Jito builds the Market Layer of Solana: the execution systems, capital markets, and incentive mechanisms that power real markets on-chain. Our products process billions in daily transaction value, Jito-Solana runs on the vast majority of Solana’s active stake, BAM is redefining how blocks get built, and JitoSOL is the leading liquid staking token on the network. Jito is a small team with product-market fit across multiple product lines and years of runway.
We are looking for a Release/Deployment Engineer to help own the operational execution of releases across Jito’s validator, block-building, RPC, simulator, and infrastructure systems.
About the Role
Jito’s infrastructure spans multiple high-stakes systems and repositories, including Jito-Solana, BAM, RPC’s, Block Engine, and related services. We regularly need to absorb upstream Anza changes, propagate those changes into downstream Jito repositories, validate behavior across environments, and safely roll upgrades through testnet and mainnet.
You will work closely with the infrastructure lead to execute release strategy, maintain release playbooks, perform deployments, monitor rollouts, coordinate rollback paths, and improve the automation and reliability of the release process over time.
You will be working on production infrastructure where correctness, uptime, latency, and operational discipline matter.
Responsibilities
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Own and execute software upgrades and releases across Jito infrastructure, including testnet upgrades, mainnet canaries, staged rollouts, and patches.
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Own the operational release checklist from preflight validation through deployment, monitoring, rollback readiness, and post-release follow-up.
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Keep release playbooks, runbooks, deployment checklists, and rollback procedures accurate and usable.
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Coordinate version/config consistency across environments, services, and repositories.
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Monitor releases in real time using dashboards, logs, alerts, and service-level health checks.
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Contribute to incremental CI/CD, automation, and tooling improvements.
You Might Be a Fit If You
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Have strong Linux systems and production operations experience.
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Have operated or supported high-availability infrastructure where failed deployments have real consequences.
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Are comfortable working across multiple repositories, services, configs, and deployment targets.
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Have strong written communication and can turn ambiguous operational knowledge into clear checklists and docs.
Qualifications
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4+ years of experience in release engineering, deployment engineering, SRE, infrastructure engineering, DevOps, platform engineering, or similar production infrastructure roles.
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High ownership and comfort working autonomously on a small team.
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Experience with linux production deployment workflows, canary rollouts, rollback procedures, incident response, and operational monitoring.
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Familiarity with Git-based release workflows, version management, branching, tagging, changelogs, and cross-repo coordination.
Nice to Have
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Experience operating blockchain, validator, trading, low-latency, or other high-stakes distributed systems.
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Familiarity with Solana validator operations, Anza/Agave, Jito-Solana, RPC infrastructure, or block-building systems.
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Experience writing code in Rust
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Experience with fleet management, systemd, Terraform, Ansible, or similar infrastructure tooling.
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Experience with observability systems such as Grafana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, or similar.
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Experience with hardware or datacenter-adjacent operational work, including firmware updates, BIOS maintenance, networking changes, or bare-metal fleet upgrades.
Benefits
- Above market compensation and multiple forms of equity
- 100% of employee health benefits covered by employer
- All-expenses-paid team retreats and conferences
- Generous PTO
- Weekly meal voucher