Senior Software Engineer, Backend
Helius · North America
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 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
Design, build, and release novel, performance-sensitive products that transform the developer experience on Solana
Optimize production systems - profiling, benchmarking, and improving latency and throughput
Collaborate with staff engineers and founders on architectural and product decisions
Improve operational excellence - observability, incident response, and making systems easier to run
Mentor junior engineers and raise the technical bar across the team
What You'll Bring
5+ years of backend engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at scale
Strong systems-level intuition - you understand what's happening beneath the abstractions
Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred), C++, or Go
Experience debugging and optimizing latency-sensitive or high-throughput systems
Demonstrated ability to own problems end-to-end with minimal direction
High intensity, high ownership - you hold yourself to an exceptional standard
Prior exposure to engineering cultures that prioritize operational excellence, reliability, and customer impact
Nice to Have
Deep Rust experience in a production, performance-critical environment
Experience with distributed systems, storage engines, or streaming infrastructure
Familiarity with profiling tools - flamegraphs, perf, valgrind
Interest in Solana, blockchain infrastructure, or real-time financial systems
On-call experience and operational ownership of production services
Mix of large and small company experience strongly preferred - you've built the habits and can operate at both speeds
Why Helius?
High-impact work: Your code will power applications used by millions across the Solana ecosystem, including Coinbase, Jupiter, and Phantom.
Serious engineering: Build fast, reliable systems and user experiences across distributed infra, high-throughput backends, and modern frontend stacks.
Ownership & growth: Lead critical initiatives, influence architecture and product direction, and take on more responsibility as the company scales.
Remote-first flexibility: Work where you’re most effective with a flexible, fully distributed team.
Competitive comp & perks: Market-leading salary, meaningful equity, generous vacation, wellness budgets, and support for learning and travel.
Mission-driven team: Join ambitious builders who move fast, take ownership, and are shaping the future of decentralized apps.
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