Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

## 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://helius-api.notion.site/The-Helius-Manifesto-1510b5a55cc5802eb3f8e41f539ed810) to see how we work and what we value.

## What You'll Do - 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.

## What We're Looking For - 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.

## 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.

Helius is Solana's leading infrastructure provider, offering high-performance RPC nodes, APIs, webhooks, transaction sending, and other tools to developers building on the Solana blockchain. It supports wallets, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and other applications for clients like Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase, and Backpack, processing billions of daily requests with 99.99% uptime.