Staff Software Engineer, Backend

Helius is the leading developer platform for the Solana blockchain, trusted by companies like Coinbase, Jupiter, and Phantom to power their applications. The company has raised over $34 million from top-tier investors including Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, and Foundation Capital, with backing from Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal. The team includes engineers who previously built critical infrastructure at AWS, Coinbase, Stripe, Google, and Digital Ocean.

You'll join Helius as a Staff Backend Engineer to own one of the company's core systems: Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index. These foundational layers operate at extreme performance and scale, sitting in the critical path of the entire Solana ecosystem. This is a leadership role where you'll set technical direction, make architectural decisions with multi-year impact, and work directly with founders and engineering leadership.

What you'll do

• Own technical direction, architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap for a core backend system
• Design and implement solutions to the hardest problems in your domain: distributed systems, storage engines, streaming pipelines, and edge infrastructure
• Drive performance engineering through profiling, benchmarking, and pushing latency and throughput to their limits
• Establish standards for operational excellence, observability, incident response, and system simplicity
• Partner with founders on long-term technical strategy and influence engineering across teams
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers while solving complex, ambiguous problems that span multiple systems

What you'll bring

• 8+ years of backend engineering building large-scale, production-grade systems
• Deep systems-level expertise where software meets hardware
• Strong proficiency in Rust, or equivalent systems programming like C++ or Go
• Proven ability to own and evolve complex systems end-to-end from architecture to operations
• Experience leading ambiguous cross-team technical initiatives to completion
• Performance engineering instincts: profiling hot paths, understanding root causes, and fixing at the code level
• High ownership and intensity, thriving in fast-moving environments with exceptional standards

Nice to have

• Deep expertise in distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, edge networking, or query engines
• Experience at petabyte scale or microsecond latency budgets
• On-call ownership of mission-critical production services
• Interest in Solana, blockchain infrastructure, or real-time financial systems
• Background spanning both large and small company environments

What we offer

• Market-leading salary with meaningful equity
• Remote-first, fully distributed work environment
• Generous vacation and wellness budgets
• Support for learning and travel
• High-impact work powering millions of users across the Solana ecosystem