Staff Software Engineer, Backend at Helius Labs

About Helius Helius is a leading developer platform on the Solana blockchain, dedicated to inspiring and accelerating the creation of crypto-powered software. Customers like Coinbase, Jupiter, and Phantom use Helius to power their applications on Solana. We’ve raised over $34m from Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, 6th Man Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Chapter One and angel investors including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, and Balaji Srinivasan. Our team members have previously built mission-critical, scalable infrastructure at AWS, Coinbase, Stripe, Google, Digital Ocean, and more. 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 take ownership of one of our core systems - Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index. These are the foundational layers of Helius's infrastructure, operating at the intersection of extreme performance requirements and real-world scale. Each system sits in the critical path of the Solana ecosystem. At this level, you're not just building - you're setting technical direction, making architectural decisions that shape the platform for years, and raising the bar for everyone around you. You'll work directly with founders and engineering leadership to define what we build and how we build it. Small team, enormous scope, and the expectation that you'll own your domain end-to-end. What You'll Do Own the technical direction for a core backend system - architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap Design and implement solutions to the hardest problems in your domain - distributed systems, storage engines, streaming pipelines, or edge infrastructure Drive performance engineering across your system - profiling, benchmarking, and pushing latency and throughput to the limit Set standards for operational excellence - observability, incident response, and making systems simpler and safer to operate Partner with founders and engineering leadership on long-term technical strategy Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, drive technical consensus, and influence without authority Identify and solve complex, ambiguous problems that span multiple systems What You'll Bring 8+ years of backend engineering with a strong track record building large-scale, production-grade systems Deep systems-level expertise - you operate comfortably at the layer where software meets hardware Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred) or equivalent systems programming language (C++, Go) Demonstrated ability to own and evolve complex systems end-to-end, from architecture to production operations Experience leading ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives and driving them to completion Performance engineering instincts - you've profiled hot paths, understood the root cause, and fixed it at the code level High ownership, high intensity - you thrive in fast-moving environments and hold yourself to an exceptional standard Prior