Helius

Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

North America · Staff+

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 93 days ago

Node.jsWebSocketsLoad BalancingCommunication

About the role

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.
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.
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.

Lead the technical direction for Gatekeeper as the unified entry point for Helius traffic, with an emphasis on p50/p99 latency and tail reliability.
Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across regions and backend pools, including failover behavior and graceful degradation.
Build robust, operator-friendly observability: SLOs, dashboards, alerts, and "is it healthy?" views that make issues diagnosable fast.
Partner with internal service teams to define and enforce contracts (timeouts, retries, error mapping, capacity signals), and reduce systemic failure modes.
Drive hardening work across security and abuse controls (auth failure behavior, rate limiting / caps enforcement, request validation).
Own production operations for Gatekeeper: incident response, on-call improvements, runbooks, and post-incident follow-through.
Significant experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems in production (proxies, gateways, distributed services, or infra-heavy platforms).

Track record of leading ambiguous, cross-team projects and shipping durable systems.
Operational excellence: you have owned services with real on-call responsibility, and you make them easier to run over time.
you have owned services with real on-call responsibility, and you make them easier to run over time.

Rust experience (or strong interest in working close to the metal for performance-critical systems).
Experience with anycast, multi-region traffic management, or edge deployments.
Familiarity with WebSockets at scale and the operational challenges that come with long-lived connections.
Interest in Solana / crypto infrastructure, market data, or latency-sensitive trading systems.
High-impact work: Your code will power applications used by millions across the Solana ecosystem, including Coinbase, Jupiter, and Phantom.
Mission-driven team: Join ambitious builders who move fast, take ownership, and are shaping the future of decentralized apps.

Competitive comp & perks: Market-leading salary, meaningful equity, generous vacation, wellness budgets, and support for learning and travel.

Market-leading salary, meaningful equity, generous vacation, wellness budgets, and support for learning and travel.

The Gatekeeper team builds and operates the edge layer that sits in front of Helius' backend infrastructure.
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.
Lead critical initiatives, influence architecture and product direction, and take on more responsibility as the company scales.

This listing is sourced directly from Helius's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.