Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

📋 Description

• • As a Staff Backend Engineer for Gatekeeper at Helius Labs, you will own and evolve the high-performance edge gateway that serves as the single entry point for JSON-RPC, WebSockets, and Helius APIs, ensuring latency and reliability comparable to running a dedicated node globally.
• • You will lead architectural decisions in routing, connection management, backpressure, and observability; design and implement load balancing and failover strategies; improve TLS termination, connection pooling, and streaming behavior; build operator-friendly observability with SLOs and dashboards; partner with service teams to define contracts and reduce failure modes; drive security hardening including rate limiting and request validation; own production operations including incident response and runbooks; and mentor engineers in performance engineering and operational rigor.
• • You will join a small, senior, performance-obsessed team at Helius Labs that builds and operates the edge layer in front of Helius’s backend infrastructure, collaborating closely with infrastructure and service owners to ensure Gatekeeper acts as a force multiplier for the entire platform.
• • In this role, you will deepen your expertise in high-throughput distributed systems, edge networking, and performance engineering; lead cross-team initiatives that shape platform reliability; influence architectural direction; and grow into broader leadership responsibilities as the company scales, all while working on mission-critical infrastructure powering Solana-based applications used by millions.