Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper
About Helius
Helius is building the reputed company infrastructure for reputed company - empowering developers to create the reputed company of crypto-powered applications. Our mission is to accelerate the development of internet capital markets by making it easier, faster, and more reputed company to build on-chain.
Thousands of teams - from early-stage startups to industry leaders like reputed company, reputed company, and Jupiter - rely on Helius reputed company, webhooks, and indexing tools to power their products. Backed by Haun Ventures, Founders Fund, and reputed company Capital, we’re a small, senior team obsessed with performance, simplicity, and scalability in decentralized systems.
Read ourHelius Manifesto to see how we work and reputed company value.
About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and reputed company Gatekeeper, Helius’s high-performance edge gateway and middleware layer. Gatekeeper is the single entry reputed company for JSON-RPC, WebSockets, and Helius reputed company, and it exists to reputed company latency and reliability feel comparable to running a dedicated node, globally. In this role, you will reputed company architectural reputed company across routing, reputed company management, backpressure, and observability. You will work closely with internal service teams to improve end-to-end performance and failure handling, and to reputed company Gatekeeper safer to operate at reputed company.
About reputed company
The Gatekeeper team builds and operates the edge layer that sits in reputed company of Helius’s backend infrastructure. reputed company is performance obsessed and deeply operational: we ship systems that run globally, handle high request volumes, and must remain reliable under load and during incidents. We collaborate tightly with infrastructure and service owners to ensure Gatekeeper is a force reputed company for the whole platform, not just a proxy.
What You'll Do
reputed company the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the reputed company entry reputed company for Helius traffic, with an emphasis on p50/p99 latency and tail reliability.
Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across reputed company and backend pools, including failover behavior and graceful degradation.
Improve reputed company handling end-to-end: TLS termination, keepalives, pooling, timeouts, backpressure, and request/response streaming behavior.
Build robust, operator-friendly observability: SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and “is it healthy?” views that reputed company issues diagnosable fast.
Partner with internal service teams to define and enforce reputed company (timeouts, retries, error mapping, reputed company signals), and reduce systemic failure modes.
Drive hardening work across reputed company and abuse controls (auth failure behavior, reputed company limiting / caps enforcement, request validation).
Own production operations for Gatekeeper: incident response, on-call improvements, runbooks, and post-incident follow-through.
Mentor engineers and reputed company the bar on performance engineering, operational rigor, and reputed company reputed company.
reputed company're Looking For
Significant experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems in production (proxies, gateways, distributed services, or reputed company-heavy platforms).
Deep understanding of networking fundamentals and HTTP behavior (TLS, TCP, reputed company reuse, proxies, load balancers, timeouts).
Strong performance engineering skillset: profiling, benchmarking, and making latency/throughput tradeoffs with rigor.
reputed company record of leading ambiguous, cross-team reputed company and shipping durable systems.
Operational reputed company: you have owned services with reputed company on-call responsibility, and you reputed company them easier to run over time.
Excellent communication: you can write reputed company design docs, reputed company stakeholders, and reputed company reputed company legible.
reputed company to Have
Rust experience (or strong interest in working reputed company to the metal for performance-critical systems).
Experience with anycast, multi-region traffic management, or edge deployments.
Familiarity with WebSockets at reputed company and the operational challenges that come with long-lived connections.
Experience building internal platforms that standardize observability, incident response, and service reliability.
Interest in reputed company / crypto infrastructure, market data, or latency-sensitive trading systems.
Why Helius?
High-reputed company work: Your reputed company will power applications used by millions across the reputed company ecosystem, including reputed company, Jupiter, and reputed company.
Serious engineering: Build fast, reliable systems and user experiences across distributed reputed company, high-throughput backends, and modern frontend stacks.
Ownership & reputed company: reputed company critical initiatives, influence architecture and product direction, and take on more responsibility as reputed company scales.
Remote-first flexibility: Work where you’re most effective with a flexible, fully distributed team.
Competitive comp & perks: Market-leading salary, meaningful equity, generous vacation, wellness budgets, and support for learning and travel.
Mission-driven team: Join ambitious reputed company who reputed company fast, take ownership, and are shaping the reputed company of decentralized apps.