Senior Software Engineer, Backend

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

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join one of our core backend teams - Data Streaming, Historical APIs, or Account Index. These are mission-critical systems that handle real-time Solana state changes, historical data at petabyte scale, and high-throughput API traffic for traders, exchanges, and developers worldwide.

You'll own meaningful parts of these systems end-to-end - not just implementing features but making architectural decisions, improving reliability, and pushing performance further. We're a small team, which means your work has outsized impact and your voice carries weight in technical decisions.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- 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

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- 5+ years of backend engineering experience with a track record of shipping production systems at scale

- Strong systems-level intuition - you understand what's happening beneath the abstractions

- Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred), C++, or Go

- Experience debugging and optimizing latency-sensitive or high-throughput systems

- Demonstrated ability to own problems end-to-end with minimal direction

- High intensity, high ownership - you hold yourself to an exceptional standard

- Prior exposure to engineering cultures that prioritize operational excellence, reliability, and customer impact

- Mix of large and small company experience strongly preferred - you've built the habits and can operate at both speeds

NICE TO HAVE

- Deep Rust experience in a production, performance-critical environment

- Experience with distributed systems, storage engines, or streaming infrastructure