Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper at Helius Labs

<h1><strong>About Helius</strong></h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><br />Read our <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://helius-api.notion.site/The-Helius-Manifesto-1510b5a55cc5802eb3f8e41f539ed810"><u>Helius Manifesto</u></a> to see how we work and what we value.</p><h1><br /><strong>About the Role</strong></h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.helius.dev/docs/gatekeeper/overview"><u>Gatekeeper</u></a>, 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. <br /><br />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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1><strong>About the Team</strong></h1><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><h1><strong>What You'll Do</strong></h1><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Lead the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the unified entry point for Helius traffic, with an emphasis on p50/p99 latency and tail reliability.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across regions and backend pools, including failover behavior and graceful degradation.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Improve connection handling end-to-end: TLS termination, keepalives, pooling, timeouts, backpressure, and request/response