Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

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.

• •Lead the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the unified entry point for Helius traffic, with an emphasis on p50/p99 latency and tail reliability.
• •Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across regions and backend pools, including failover behavior and graceful degradation.
• •Improve connection handling end-to-end: TLS termination, keepalives, pooling, timeouts, backpressure, and request/response streaming behavior.
• •Build robust, operator-friendly observability: SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and “is it healthy?” views that make issues diagnosable fast.
• •Partner with internal service teams to define and enforce contracts (timeouts, retries, error mapping, capacity signals), and reduce systemic failure modes.
• •Drive hardening work across security and abuse controls (auth failure behavior, rate limiting / caps enforcement, request validation).
• •Own production operations for Gatekeeper: incident response, on-call improvements, runbooks, and post-incident follow-through.
• •Mentor engineers and raise the bar on performance engineering, operational rigor, and code quality.

• •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.

• •Significant experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems in production (proxies, gateways, distributed services, or infra-heavy platforms).
• •Deep understanding of networking fundamentals and HTTP behavior (TLS, TCP, connection reuse, proxies, load balancers, timeouts).
• •Strong performance engineering skillset: profiling, benchmarking, and making latency/throughput tradeoffs with rigor.
• •Track record of leading ambiguous, cross-team projects and shipping durable systems.
• •Operational excellence: you have owned services with real on-call responsibility, and you make them easier to run over time.
• •Excellent communication: you can write clear design docs, align stakeholders, and make decisions legible.