Sr. Performance Engineer, Trading Infrastructure

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 Sr. Performance Engineer to work on 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 dig into performance 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

• Profile, tune, and optimize the low-level Rust services that power traders and financial institutions

• Design systems for low-latency environments where microseconds matter

• Ship improvements that have immediate, visible impact across the network

• Own foundational systems end-to-end and keep them simple, reliable, and easy to operate

What You'll Bring

• 5+ years of systems-level engineering in Rust or C++

• Deep experience tuning high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems

• Strong intuition for hardware, operating systems, and network performance

• Ability to operate with high ownership on difficult technical problems

• A desire to push performance to the limit, not just make it “good enough”

Nice to Have

• Experience in trading systems (DeFi or TradFi)

• Background in performance-obsessed environments like Cloudflare, Netflix, or similar

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 and high-throughput backends

• 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