Building a Performance Team
At Eclipse, we are building out a new performance team to create a novel Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) compatible validator. Having built our system on top of the SVM gave us a strong start; we observed over 100,000 TPS in the lab. However, we do believe that we can do significantly better, and as our chain scales up, we expect to see real world loads in that range.
As a layer-2 rollup, Eclipse is not constrained by many limitations of a layer-1 blockchain. For instance, we are less dependent on wide-area consensus. Additionally, validators for Eclipse can use custom-designed powerful and specialized hardware.
We are interested in engineers and researchers working on
- High-performance networking
- Runtimes and virtual machines
- Databases and storage media
- Hardware-software co-design
- GPU-based programming, FPGAs, NICs and direct storage manipulation
About The Opportunity
The opportunity here is vast: the work of the performance team will be part of what drives Eclipse for years to come. It will need to be both on the cusp of innovation frequently informed by research and academic designs, and at the same time targeting something that is quite pragmatic. Additionally, the bar for this is quite high across the board — much of the SVM ecosystem has been designed with performance in mind, so even now Eclipse is able to hit over 100K TPS in the lab.
The Road To GigaCompute
Blockchains often talk about performance in terms of transaction throughput, i.e. TPS. However, much of the execution is running onchain code, known as smart contracts or programs. Solana prices execution in terms of Compute Units (CUs). The amount of CUs available per unit of time is limited both by hardware and software inefficiencies. We intend to address these inefficiencies, raising the bar on what can be done on our chain.As such, while we expect to increase the number of transactions that can be processed per-second as a by-product, our main focus is on making sure that the real-world applications are not held back by CU limitations. With this more holistic approach, we intend to push the boundaries of what can be done in distributed systems.Roughly speaking, we plan to make 10x improvements from where we are now to get to 1 GigaCompute, as outlined in our Roadmap. The unlock this kind of performance enables is huge: this should enable us to do things like training AI models onchain and to run complex games with onchain game logic.
What We Are Looking For
The perfect candidate will have deep experience in at least one of the areas above, along with a performance-oriented mindset. Given the areas we want to cover, we are keen to find a balanced mix of engineering and research talent. We are interested in candidates of different levels of seniority. If you have a hacker mindset, have made significant contributions to the performance of some project, or are a promising young engineer that would like to, you would be a good fit. We encourage you to apply here.
ℹ️ Note that direct experience with blockchain is encouraged, but not strictly necessary
About Eclipse
Joining us means working on high-impact solutions that push the boundaries of what's possible in crypto. We're backed by top-tier investors like Polychain, Placeholder, and DBA, with $65M raised since our inception in 2022. This funding gives us the resources to scale and innovate, while maintaining the agility of a startup. As a globally distributed and remote-first company, we offer the flexibility to collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously. Between regular weekly all-hands meetings and quarterly in-person meetups, we are constantly finding ways to stay connected, while driving performance and output. This is an opportunity to help shape our culture, drive real technical impact, and grow with a team that values intellectual honesty and action. We offer competitive salary, equity, and benefits - ensuring that as we scale, so do you.