Senior Software Engineer, Backend

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 https://www.helius.dev/blog/manifesto to see how we work and what we value. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join one of our core backend teams - Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index. These are mission-critical systems that handle real-time Solana state changes, historical data at petabyte scale, and high-throughput API traffic for traders, exchanges, and developers worldwide. You'll own meaningful parts of these systems end-to-end - not just implementing features but making architectural decisions, improving reliability, and pushing performance further. We're a small team, which means your work has outsized impact and your voice carries weight in technical decisions. 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 - Mix of large and small company experience strongly preferred - you've built the habits and can operate at both speeds 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 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 across distributed infra and high-throughput backends - 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 building infrastructure for internet capital markets