Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper at Helius Labs

About Helius Helius is building the core infrastructure for Solana - empowering developers to create the next generation of crypto-powered applications. Our mission is to accelerate the development of internet capital markets by making it easier, faster, and more intuitive to build on-chain. Thousands of teams - from early-stage startups to industry leaders like Coinbase, Phantom, and Jupiter - rely on Helius APIs, webhooks, and indexing tools to power their products. Backed by Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, and Foundation Capital, we’re a small, senior team obsessed with performance, simplicity, and scalability in decentralized systems. Read our Helius Manifesto to see how we work and what we value. About the Role We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve Gatekeeper , Helius’ high-performance edge gateway and middleware layer. Gatekeeper is the single entry point for JSON-RPC, WebSockets, and Helius APIs, and it exists to make latency and reliability feel comparable to running a dedicated node, globally. In this role, you will lead architectural decisions across routing, connection management, backpressure, and observability. You will work closely with internal service teams to improve end-to-end performance and failure handling, and to make Gatekeeper safer to operate at high scale. About the Team The Gatekeeper team builds and operates the edge layer that sits in front of Helius’ backend infrastructure. The team is performance-obsessed and deeply operational: we ship systems that run globally, handle high request volumes, and must remain reliable under load and during incidents. We collaborate tightly with infrastructure and service owners to ensure Gatekeeper is a force multiplier for the whole platform, not just a proxy. What You'll Do Lead the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the unified entry point for Helius traffic, with an emphasis on p50/p99 latency and tail reliability. Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across regions and backend pools, including failover behavior and graceful degradation. Improve connection handling end-to-end: TLS termination, keepalives, pooling, timeouts, backpressure, and request/response streaming behavior. Build robust, operator-friendly observability: SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and “is it healthy?” views that make issues diagnosable fast. Partner with internal service teams to define and enforce contracts (timeouts, retries, error mapping, capacity signals), and reduce systemic failure modes. Drive hardening work across security and abuse controls (auth failure behavior, rate limiting / caps enforcement, request validation). Own production operations for Gatekeeper: incident response, on-call improvements, runbooks, and post-incident follow-through. Mentor engineers and raise the bar on performance engineering, operational rigor, and code quality. What We're Looking For Significant experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems in production (pr