Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

Helius·North America·remote global
crypto:applicationengineeringIC6Engineering
Compensation
Not disclosed
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://helius-api.notion.site/The-Helius-Manifesto-1510b5a55cc5802eb3f8e41f539ed810 to see how we work and what we value. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve Gatekeeper https://www.helius.dev/docs/gatekeeper/overview, Helius’s high-performance edge gateway and middleware layer. Gatekeeper is the single entry point for JSON-RPC, WebSockets, and Helius APIs, and it exists to make latency and reliability feel comparable to running a dedicated node, globally. In this role, you will lead architectural decisions across routing, connection management, backpressure, and observability. You will work closely with internal service teams to improve end-to-end performance and failure handling, and to make Gatekeeper safer to operate at high scale. ABOUT THE TEAM The Gatekeeper team builds and operates the edge layer that sits in front of Helius’s backend infrastructure. The team 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 multiplier for the whole platform, not just a proxy. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the unified