Head of Security

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 hiring our first Head of Security. You’ll own security across Helius and lead it hands-on: doing the work yourself across our engineering platform while building toward a team. You’ll report to our COO and Head of Engineering, and our leadership team will depend on you to understand, manage, and make clear calls on risk. Your priorities are to establish a strong security posture across our engineering platform and to own incident response. You’ll have real authority and a clear mandate to protect a company operating critical infrastructure at scale. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead security at Helius, setting direction and owning execution across infrastructure, cloud, and production systems - Own incident response end to end: detection, response, runbooks, on-call readiness, and regular tabletop exercises - Establish a strong security posture across our engineering platform, including identity and access management, secrets and key management, network segmentation, logging, monitoring, and detection - Review and manage third-party and supply-chain risk - Partner with engineering to embed security into how we build and ship, without becoming a bottleneck - Lead our compliance roadmap and respond to customer security reviews - Hire, develop, and grow the security team as we scale - Own the security strategy and roadmap, and maintain our threat model and risk register, prioritizing against real risk - Communicate clearly about risk with executives, engineers, and customers WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years in security, including experience securing high-availability, internet-facing infrastructure at scale - Strong engineering skills: you read and write code and can dig into systems yourself - Deep expertise in cloud security, bare metal and production environments - Hands-on experience with detection and response, and you’ve led through a real security incident - Experience building a security program or significantly scaling a security function - Experience securing developer products, APIs, or platforms - Strong grasp of secrets and key management - Comfortable moving fast, iterating, and making good decisions under pressure - Pragmatic and high-ownership: you do the work and don’t wait for a large team or established tooling - Clear communicator who can partner with engineers and say no without being a blocker - Comfortable working in a fully remote, async-friendly team NICE TO HAVE - Experience leading a SOC 2 or similar audit - Prior security leadership at a high-growth startup 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 shaping the future of decentralized apps.