Staff 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 Staff Backend Engineer to take ownership of one of our core systems - 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 exposure to engineering cultures that prioritize operational excellence, performance, and customer reliability at scale NICE TO HAVE - Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, edge networking, or query engines - Experience building or operating systems 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 - Open source contributions or technical writing that demonstrates depth - 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 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