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 to see how we work and what we value.

# About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve Gatekeeper, Helius’s high-performance edge gateway and middleware layer. Gatekeeper is the single entry point for JSON-RPC, WebSockets, and Helius APIs, and it exists to make latency and reliability feel comparable to running a dedicated node, globally.
In this role, you will lead architectural decisions across routing, connection management, backpressure, and observability. You will work closely with internal service teams to improve end-to-end performance and failure handling, and to make Gatekeeper safer to operate at high scale.

# About the Team

The Gatekeeper team builds and operates the edge layer that sits in front of Helius’s backend infrastructure. The team is performance obsessed and deeply operational: we ship systems that run globally, handle high request volumes, and must remain reliable under load and during incidents. We collaborate tightly with infrastructure and service owners to ensure Gatekeeper is a force multiplier for the whole platform, not just a proxy.

# 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.

# Nice to Have

• Rust experience (or strong interest in working close to the metal for performance-critical systems).
• Experience with anycast, multi-region traffic management, or edge deployments.
• Familiarity with WebSockets at scale and the operational challenges that come with long-lived connections.
• Experience building internal platforms that standardize observability, incident response, and service reliability.
• Interest in Solana / crypto infrastructure, market data, or latency-sensitive trading systems.

# 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.