Staff Backend Engineer, Historical APIs 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 who wants to own and evolve serious infrastructure. This isn't about executing on a roadmap - you'll define technical direction, architect systems that scale to multi-petabyte datasets, and set the standard for engineering excellence across the team. You'll work autonomously on high-impact problems, mentor senior engineers, and drive architectural decisions that shape the future of our infrastructure. About the Team The Archival team exposes APIs for querying Solana’s multi-petabyte ledger with sub-100ms. If you love the challenge of large datasets and low-latency performance engineering, this is the right team for you. The team moves fast, owns an enormous surface area, and operates like a small group of founders sitting in the critical path of the company. What You'll Do Architect and lead the development of ingestion, indexing, and retrieval systems across our archival infrastructure Drive technical strategy for API performance, reliability, and scalability across high-throughput services Design and optimize data models and query patterns for ClickHouse, Postgres, and RocksDB at scale Lead system design discussions and make architectural decisions on caching, distributed data patterns, and performance trade-offs Set standards for operational excellence, debugging methodologies, and performance profiling across production systems Mentor senior engineers and elevate the team's technical capabilities Partner with leadership on long-term technical roadmap and infrastructure investments Identify and drive solutions to complex, ambiguous problems that span multiple systems What You'll Bring 7+ years of backend engineering experience with a track record of building large-scale, high-performance systems Deep expertise in Rust (strongly preferred), C++, or equivalent systems programming languages Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems, data pipelines, and performance-critical infrastructure at scale Expert-level knowledge of database internals, schema design, and optimization patterns for large datasets Demonstrated ability to architect simple, elegant solutions to complex technical problems Strong technical leadership and mentorship skills with the ability to influence without