Platform Engineering Lead

About the role

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://www.helius.dev/blog/manifesto to see how we work and what we value.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This is the lead role for Platform at Helius. Reporting to the Co-founder/Head of Engineering, you'll build and lead the team that owns the foundation under everything we ship: our bare metal fleet, how software gets built and deployed, observability, reliability, and engineering security.

Our products carry real traffic and real revenue, and our customers include trading firms and wallets with no tolerance for downtime. Your job is to make reliability a discipline rather than a heroic effort. That means SLOs and error budgets, a real incident process, blameless postmortems, and automation that removes toil instead of documenting it. If Google's SRE book is a reference point for how you think teams should operate, you'll feel at home here.

This is a hands-on lead role. You'll set direction and grow the team. You'll also stay close enough to the systems to make the hard technical calls and ship when it matters. No crypto background is required.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Set the Platform roadmap and own outcomes across bare metal, builds and deployments, observability, SRE, security, and node operations

- Build our SRE practice: SLOs, alerting standards, incident command, on-call health, postmortems, and incident automation

- Lead our observability overhaul: migrate off Datadog onto ClickHouse and Grafana, and raise the bar on visibility across every service

- Standardize how we build and deploy software to machines, so shipping is fast, safe, and consistent across teams

- Partner with our security lead to plan and execute the engineering security roadmap

- Drive fleet strategy, including capacity planning, provider relationships, and cost analysis

- Hire, mentor, and grow Platform engineers, and set the team's operating norms in a remote, async-heavy environment

- Work closely with product engineering teams (Data Streaming, Historical APIs, Gatekeeper, and others) so Platform accelerates them rather than gating them

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- 8+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering, including time as a tech lead or engineering manager

- Deep experience running production infrastructure at scale, with meaningful bare metal experience