Get hired by Triton: a guide for Solana engineers

We have a confession to make. While we always read resumes when they come in, we’re strongly biased toward GitHub when it comes to hiring engineers.

We believe you learn more from someone’s commits than from anything they write about themselves, and this philosophy has been the foundation of our team since day one of Triton. We have a history of finding the most relentless open source contributors in the ecosystem and bringing them in-house, not to take them away from the community, but to give them the resources to build even bigger things for it.

We did it with Wilfred Almeida, who built LightDAS, a lightweight spin on the Metaplex DAS API that was so sharp we knew we had to bring him in. We did it with Rafael Ribas, who caught our eye developing Velos and is now driving our Jet TVU client and contributing directly to Agave. We did it with Miles Smith, whose tinkering with our Old Faithful archives provided such valuable feedback that we could not imagine building it without him.

And yesterday, we did it again.

We are thrilled to welcome Prapti Sharma to the Triton One engineering team. Her path to joining us involves a technical deep dive that went “viral” (or as viral as an article about Solana indexing can go), an intensive Fellowship, a startup village, and a hunger to build that kept her shipping code while she was supposed to be studying for her final university exams.

How it all started: fellowship, indexing, Superteam

Long before Prapti showed up in our Slack, her work was already circulating in the ecosystem. In Solana, real contribution is hard to miss: people see it, use it, and talk about it.

Her journey started with the Solana Fellowship, an intensive 8-week educational program. Around 500 people took part. Only about 5% received a stipend at the end, and Prapti was one of them.

From there, she went deeper into indexing, built an open-source indexer on Solana, then wrote up what she had learned in a long-form guide, “Indexing on Solana”. The piece gained traction, got her $900 in royalties (someone “tokenised” her project on Bags.fm), and led to an invitation to join Superteam as a member.

Superteam is what brought her to Solana Startup Village, where the 10-day building sprint, the mini x402 hackathon, and the main x402 hackathon that followed are what ultimately led her to Old Faithful, to our bounty, and to us.

Turning an RPC pain into x402 idea

While at Solana Startup Village, the Superteam crew ran a mini x402 hackathon for the attendees on top of the main global x402 hackathon that was already running.

Prapti and her teammate Reuben spent the first days bouncing ideas around. Coming from indexing work, she already knew how painful RPC costs can be for solo builders and smaller teams: you often need a specific pattern of queries, but still end up paying for a full subscription.

They decided to push in that direction. If every RPC request carried a tiny payment, you could drop API keys and monthly contracts and let people pay only for what they actually call. So they started building a 402-powered flow around RPC calls.

At the same time, she was already talking through these ideas with Nagaprasad from Jupiter, a friend on X she had been ping ponging concepts with. At some point in that back and forth, he sent her a link to our x402 bounty. Triton had just announced a prize for the best integration of the x402 protocol with Old Faithful.

Building the x402 gateway for Old Faithful

Old Faithful is the archival backbone of Triton’s Project Yellowstone and the only public, fully verified, decentralised archive of Solana’s history from genesis. It stores the ledger in portable CAR files and serves it over standard JSON RPC and gRPC, so anyone can run a historical endpoint without BigTable or heavy archival nodes. The bounty was straightforward: integrate x402 micropayments with Old Faithful so that as more researchers query Solana’s history, the cost of serving that data is sustainable for both Triton and the ecosystem.

Prapti and Reuben took their Startup Village idea and turned it into a working submission for the x402 hackathon.

Their project, x402 Triton Gateway, is a micropayment-gated access layer for Old Faithful. Instead of relying on API keys and flat plans, it uses HTTP 402 to ask for a tiny USDC payment when someone wants to query historical data. The gateway verifies the payment through a separate facilitator service on Solana mainnet, then proxies the request to Old Faithful and returns both the data and a cryptographic receipt for what was paid.

On top of basic pay per query support, they also implemented range-based access. A user can pay once to unlock a range of blocks and then run unlimited queries within that range for a specified time period.

The whole thing is wired into a dashboard that lets you connect a wallet, see pricing up front, run queries, and inspect receipts. It is built with a production-style stack: TypeScript services for the gateway and facilitator, Old Faithful as the upstream archive, a Next-based frontend, and real USDC payments on mainnet.

If you want to learn more, check out the x402 Triton Gateway repo.

How commits plus commitment turned into a job

Prapti submitted the project almost at the deadline and posted a video walkthrough the next day. Linus, one of Triton’s founders, saw the video, clicked through to the repo, and sent her a DM right away saying the project looked promising and sharing suggestions on what could be improved.

She didn’t just nod and disappear. She implemented the feedback, pushed new commits, and kept iterating on the gateway. A few days later, she was on a call with the team, talking through her work and a full-time opportunity.

We didn’t need a whiteboard exercise. Her GitHub and the x402 project already showed how she thinks, how she structures code, and how she responds to review. We didn’t need to test for motivation either. In the last half year, she had gone from a student learning Rust, to a Solana Fellow, to a Superteam member, to a Startup Village builder, to an x402 winner, shipping sharp open-source projects along the way.

Backing builders who move Solana forward

We are telling this story as a reminder that if you are shipping cool stuff and see yourself in our mission, you should check out our open roles here.

We invest in the people who build the foundation. Whether you are a veteran tightening validator clients or a student trying to make RPC more accessible, if you ship code that moves Solana forward, we are paying attention.

Projects like Flash Trade, Turbin3, and La Familia started their journeys on the infrastructure we provided because we want to lower the barrier to entry. We want to see what you can build when you aren't worried about the bill.

And sometimes, if you build something impressive enough, we won't just support your project. We'll hire you.

Congratulations to Prapti on the x402 win, and welcome to the family. 

You can check out Prapti’s & Reuben’s winning code on GitHub and follow her journey on X.