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.

About the Role

We're looking for a Staff Performance Engineer to own the most latency-critical systems at Helius. These services are responsible for streaming Solana's state changes across our global network and providing real-time data APIs to traders, exchanges, and DeFi protocols.

They handle massive throughput, and small optimizations create outsized impact. You'll lead performance strategy, drive cross-team architectural decisions, and dig into the hardest bottlenecks to make our products faster and more efficient. The problems are challenging, the expectations are high, and the improvements you ship will be felt across the Solana ecosystem.

What You'll Do

• Set Technical Direction: Drive performance standards across Helius' most latency-critical systems, influencing engineering primitives company-wide.
• Low-Level Engineering: Profile, tune, and optimize the low-level Rust services that power traders and financial institutions.
• Latency Management: Design systems engineered for low-latency environments where microseconds matter.
• Eliminate Bottlenecks: Lead cross-team initiatives to identify and systematically dismantle backend processing bottlenecks.
• System Ownership: Own foundational services end-to-end and keep them simple, reliable, and easy to operate.

What You'll Bring

• Systems Mastery: 8+ years of systems-level engineering experience utilizing Rust or C++.
• High-Throughput Focus: Deep experience tuning high-throughput, latency-sensitive distributed clusters.
• Architecture Track Record: Proven background leading ambiguous, cross-team technical tracks and shipping durable services.
• Low-Level Intuition: Strong baseline intuition for hardware mechanics, operating systems, and high-frequency network performance.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing crypto trading pipelines, DeFi protocols, or TradFi electronic execution systems.
• Architectural background in performance-obsessed environments like Cloudflare, Netflix, or equivalent infrastructure operators.

What We Offer

• High-Impact Track: Your production code will power the apps utilized by millions across Solana, including Jupiter and Phantom.
• Flexibility: Remote-first layout structure allowing you to build wherever you operate at maximum velocity.
• Comp Vector: Market-leading base salary, meaningful equity packages, wellness budgets, and extensive travel support.