Staff Backend Engineer (Rust) - High-Impact Solana Infra

SOLANA FOUNDATION; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own core systems like Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index, sitting at the heart of Solana's infrastructure. You will set technical direction, make architectural decisions, and collaborate directly with founders and engineering leadership to define what and how we build in a small team with enormous scope.

The role emphasizes high-performance, scalable systems, mentorship, and a strong focus on operational excellence,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience shipping production systems at scale.
• Strong systems-level intuition underlying abstractions.
• Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred), C++, or Go.
• Experience debugging and optimizing latency-sensitive or high-throughput systems.
• Ability to own problems end-to-end with minimal direction.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and release novel, performance-sensitive products that transform the developer experience on Solana
• Optimize production systems - profiling, benchmarking, and improving latency and throughput
• Collaborate with staff engineers and founders on architectural and product decisions
• Improve operational excellence - observability, incident response, and making systems easier to run
• Mentor junior engineers and raise the technical bar across the team

Skills

Backend engineering

Systems thinking

Rust (preferred)

C++

Go

Latency optimization

Ownership

Job description

Helius is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own core systems like Gatekeeper, Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index, sitting at the heart of Solana's infrastructure. You will set technical direction, make architectural decisions, and collaborate directly with founders and engineering leadership to define what and how we build in a small team with enormous scope.

The role emphasizes high-performance, scalable systems, mentorship, and a strong focus on operational excellence,