Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Helius is a developer platform on the Solana blockchain that provides infrastructure for crypto-powered software. The Staff Backend Engineer will own the technical direction, architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap of a core backend system while solving complex distributed systems and infrastructure challenges. The role also involves setting operational standards, partnering with engineering leadership, mentoring engineers, and leading cross-team technical initiatives.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical direction for a core backend system - architecture, reliability, performance, and roadmap
- Design and implement solutions to the hardest problems in your domain - distributed systems, storage engines, streaming pipelines, or edge infrastructure
- Drive performance engineering across your system - profiling, benchmarking, and pushing latency and throughput to the limit
- Set standards for operational excellence - observability, incident response, and making systems simpler and safer to operate
- Partner with founders and engineering leadership on long-term technical strategy
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, drive technical consensus, and influence without authority
- Identify and solve complex, ambiguous problems that span multiple systems
Skills
- 8+ years of backend engineering with a strong track record building large-scale, production-grade systems
- Deep systems-level expertise - you operate comfortably at the layer where software meets hardware
- Demonstrated ability to own and evolve complex systems end-to-end, from architecture to production operations
- Experience leading ambiguous, cross-team technical initiatives and driving them to completion
- Performance engineering instincts - you've profiled hot paths, understood the root cause, and fixed it at the code level
- High ownership, high intensity - you thrive in fast-moving environments and hold yourself to an exceptional standard
- Prior exposure to engineering cultures that prioritize operational excellence, performance, and customer reliability at scale
- Deep expertise in one or more of: distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, edge networking, or query engines
- Experience building or operating systems at petabyte scale or microsecond latency budgets
- On-call ownership of mission-critical production services
- Interest in Solana, blockchain infrastructure, or real-time financial systems
- Open source contributions or technical writing that demonstrates depth
- Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred) or equivalent systems programming language (C++, Go)
- Mix of large and small company experience strongly preferred - you've built the habits and can operate at both speeds
Benefits
- High-impact work powering applications used by millions across the Solana ecosystem
- Remote-first flexibility: work where you’re most effective with a flexible, fully distributed team
- Meaningful equity
- Generous vacation
- Wellness budgets
- Support for learning and travel
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship