Sr. Backend Engineer, Historical APIs

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 to see how we work and what we value.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who wants to work on serious infrastructure. This isn't a narrow feature role - you'll own meaningful pieces of the stack, drive technical decisions, and ship production code that gets used immediately. You'll work alongside staff engineers, contribute to architectural discussions, and take end-to-end ownership of projects that directly impact our performance and scalability. Expect high ownership, fast feedback loops, and real impact.

About the Team

The Archival team exposes APIs for querying Solana’s multi-petabyte ledger with sub 100ms latency. If you love the challenge of large datasets and low-latency performance engineering, this is the right team for you. The team moves fast, owns an enormous surface area, and operates like a small group of founders sitting in the critical path of the company.

What You'll Do

• Build and own ingestion, indexing, and retrieval features across our archival systems

• Improve API performance and reliability for high-throughput services

• Optimize query performance and design schemas for databases like ClickHouse, Postgres, and RocksDB

• Collaborate with staff engineers on caching strategies, scaling patterns, and distributed data architecture

• Debug, profile, and maintain production systems with a focus on performance and reliability

• Participate in system design discussions and contribute to technical planning

• Take ownership of projects from design through deployment and monitoring

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of strong backend engineering experience building scalable, high-performance systems

• Proficiency in Rust (strongly preferred), C++, or an equivalent systems programming language

• Professional experience with distributed systems, data pipelines, and performance-focused engineering

• Solid understanding of database schema design and optimization patterns for large datasets

• Proven ability to break down complex problems into simple, maintainable solutions

• Strong debugging and performance profiling skills in production environments

• Self-driven with the ability to own projects independently and drive them to completion

• Relentless curiosity and a drive to dive deep into performance optimizations

• Desire for a fast-moving, high-ownership environment

Nice to Have

• Exposure to Solana, blockchain, or web3 infrastructure

• Experience with Postgres, ClickHouse, and/or RocksDB

• Contributions to open source projects or technical communities

• Experience mentoring other engineers

Why Helius?

• High-impact work: Your code will power applications used by millions across the Solana ecosystem, including Coinbase, Jupiter, and Phantom

• Serious engineering: Build fast, reliable systems and user experiences across distributed infra, high-throughput backends, and modern frontend stacks

• Ownership & growth: Lead critical initiatives, influence architecture and product direction, and take on more responsibility as the 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 builders who move fast, take ownership, and are shaping the future of decentralized apps