Staff Backend Engineer - Remote, High-Impact Systems (Rust)

Helius; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Job summary

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own one of our core systems—Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index—sitting at the heart of Solana infrastructure. You’ll set technical direction, make architectural decisions, and raise the bar for the team, working end-to-end with founders and engineering leadership in a small team with enormous scope.

You’ll lead design and implementation of high-performance, scalable backend components, mentor engineers, and drive

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering with large-scale, production-grade systems.
• Deep systems-level expertise across software and hardware boundaries.
• Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred) or C++/Go.
• Ability to own and evolve complex systems end-to-end, from architecture to production.
• Experience leading ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives to completion.
• Performance engineering instincts: profile, diagnose, and optimize hot paths.
• High ownership and intensity; thrive in fast-moving environments.
• Exposure to operational excellence, reliability, and scalable customer services.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for a core backend system—architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap.
• Design and implement solutions to hard problems in distributed systems, storage engines, streaming pipelines, or edge infrastructure.
• Drive performance engineering across your system—profiling, benchmarking, latency, throughput optimization.
• Set standards for observability, incident response, and safe operation of systems.
• Partner with founders and leadership on long-term technical strategy.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers; drive consensus and influence without authority.
• Identify and solve complex, ambiguous problems spanning multiple systems.

Skills

Backend engineering

Rust

Distributed systems

Performance tuning

Leadership

Tools

Go

C++

Job description

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own one of our core systems—Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index—sitting at the heart of Solana infrastructure. You’ll set technical direction, make architectural decisions, and raise the bar for the team, working end-to-end with founders and engineering leadership in a small team with enormous scope.

You’ll lead design and implementation of high-performance, scalable backend components, mentor engineers, and drive