Senior Protocol & Product Engineer

Welcome to Perena: Your Risk Layer on Solana
Perena is a decentralized financial protocol on Solana that offers USD STAR (USD*), a yield-bearing asset. USD* is fully collateralized and earns yield from diversified, real sources such as delta-neutral strategies and secured borrow-lend market positions. Its value grows automatically, making it a simple, secure way to save on-chain.
USD* is fully collateralized by a diversified portfolio of yield-generating assets and positions, including:
Delta-neutral hedged positions on centralized and decentralized exchanges (e.g., BTC, ETH, SOL)
Secured borrow-lend market positions involving on-chain stablecoins
Real-world assets, such as the reinsurance fund by OnRe
Perena actively manages asset allocation and diversifies across multiple strategies to reduce single points of failure and optimize for sustainable, consistent yield performance.
Built on Solana’s high-performance blockchain, Perena is creating a liquid, yield-bearing digital dollar that anyone can access with a sustainable, risk-managed approach.
Looking ahead, Perena is building a full suite of on-chain stablebanking products to expand access to real yield across crypto and traditional finance. The goal is a sustainable financial experience for anyone to transact, save, and invest on-chain.
Perena is founded by a team of builders from the Solana ecosystem with backgrounds in TradFi and DeFi. We believe deeply in pushing financial architecture forward — and in doing it with transparency, resilience, and speed.
We’re backed by some of the best in the world, including:

• Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal

• Investors from Citadel, Jane Street, IMC, and Susquehanna

• Borderless Capital, Binance Labs, Primitive Ventures, Maelstrom, Anagram, Breed, and others

Perena was a sponsor of the Colosseum Hackathon Stablecoin Track, helping fund the next generation of stablecoin projects on Solana. Our growing community spans over 20,000 developers, users, and builders aligned around one goal: reinventing how money works.
What You’ll do

• Turn ambiguous product ideas into well-designed, production-ready systems. This person should be able to challenge requirements, make sound architectural decisions, write the technical plan, and deliver quickly with limited supervision.

• Design flow-of-funds orchestration across venues and chains — bridging, routing, rebalancing between custodial and non-custodial systems — with reliable settlement, reconciliation, and failure handling as first-class concerns

• Develop custody and key management patterns that meet institutional-grade security requirements across custodial and non-custodial environments

• Build on-chain settlement and payment flows, including integrations with DEXs, lending markets, custodians, and bridge infrastructure — starting on Solana (Rust) and extending across EVM and other chains as we scale

• Build and maintain the systems that move Perena's money: minting/redeeming USD*, allocating collateral, and routing capital between on-chain protocols, centralized custodians/exchanges, and partner bank rails

What We’re Looking ForDefining characteristics

• 3+ years building financial systems where correctness and settlement guarantees are non-negotiable — payment rails, custody/settlement infrastructure, or trading systems

• Built and shipped a DeFi, fintech, trading, or infrastructure product in a small team.

• Has owned meaningful systems from design through production.

• Strong smart-contract and backend/infrastructure fundamentals.

• Experience with EVM; Solana experience is valuable.

• Understands vaults, asset management, yield products, or onchain financial primitives.

• Familiar with institutional concerns such as custody, permissions, compliance integrations, accounting, and operational controls.

• Ideally a former founder or early engineer—even if the company or protocol ultimately failed.

• Comfortable working directly with founders and translating commercial opportunities into scoped products.

Defining characteristics

• Product-minded: Begins with the user, business objective, and operating constraints (not just the requested implementation)

• High agency: Identifies gaps, proposes solutions, and keeps moving without waiting for granular direction.

• Bias for action: can take a half-formed spec and run with it, iterating quickly rather than waiting for full direction.

• Architecturally credible: Someone whose judgment on system design can be trusted with minimal oversight.

• Constructively challenging: Pushes back when requirements are unclear, risky, or cannot meet a proposed timeframe.

• Clear communicator: Produces concise technical specifications before significant implementation

Earlier in your career? Apply anyway if you can show real campaign ownership, sharp writing, and a clear point of view on the market.
Why Perena?
Stablecoins are transforming how the world stores, moves, and grows value — and we’re still early. This is a once-in-a-generation shift: from legacy money to programmable, accessible, internet-native finance. Building here isn’t just technically interesting — it’s globally meaningful.
We own our future — we trust each other to take initiative. Voices are heard and outcomes matter.
We treat our work as craft — thoughtful, opinionated, and precise.Many of us come from design, art, or cultural backgrounds.
We think from first principles — Perena is a reimagining of financial infrastructure. That starts with reimagining how we build.
We work in public — we value clarity, writing, and sharing progress openly within the team and with our community.
Originally posted on Himalayas