Staff Backend Architect - Scalable Distributed Systems

SOLANA FOUNDATION; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Market-leading salary

Meaningful equity

Generous vacation

Wellness budgets

Learning and travel support

Job summary

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own one of our core systems—Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index—at the intersection of performance and scale. You’ll set technical direction, shape architecture, and drive end-to-end ownership with founders and leadership.

You’ll lead design decisions, mentor senior engineers, and raise the bar for reliability and operability across critical infrastructure that serves the Solana ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience building large-scale systems.
• Strong systems-level expertise spanning software and hardware considerations.
• Proficiency in Rust (preferred) or C++/Go with solid production experience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for a core backend system, including architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap.
• Design and implement solutions to hard problems in distributed systems, storage, streaming, or edge infrastructure.
• Drive performance engineering through profiling, benchmarking, and latency/throughput improvements.
• Set standards for observability, incident response, and safe, operable systems.
• Collaborate with founders and leadership on long-term technical strategy; mentor engineers and influence across teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Rust

C++

Go

System design

Performance engineering

Ownership mentality

Mentoring

Leadership

Job description

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own one of our core systems—Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index—at the intersection of performance and scale. You’ll set technical direction, shape architecture, and drive end-to-end ownership with founders and leadership.

You’ll lead design decisions, mentor senior engineers, and raise the bar for reliability and operability across critical infrastructure that serves the Solana ecosystem.