Staff Performance Engineer, Trading Infrastructure

Helius

22h•Remote

About The Position

Helius is building the core infrastructure for Solana, aiming to simplify the creation of crypto-powered applications and accelerate the development of internet capital markets. Thousands of teams rely on Helius APIs, webhooks, and indexing tools. We are seeking a Staff Performance Engineer to take ownership of the most latency-critical systems at Helius. These services are crucial for streaming Solana's state changes globally and providing real-time data APIs to traders, exchanges, and DeFi protocols. The role involves leading performance strategy, influencing architectural decisions, and optimizing services where even small improvements have a significant impact across the Solana ecosystem.

Requirements

8+ years of systems-level engineering in Rust or C++
Deep experience tuning high-throughput, latency-sensitive systems
Track record of leading ambiguous, cross-team technical projects and shipping durable systems
Strong intuition for hardware, operating systems, and network performance
Ability to operate with high ownership on difficult technical problems and make decisions legible to stakeholders
A desire to push performance to the limit, not just make it "good enough"

Nice To Haves

Experience in trading systems (DeFi or TradFi)
Background in performance-obsessed environments like Cloudflare, Netflix, or similar

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for performance across Helius' most latency-critical systems, influencing architecture and engineering standards company-wide
Profile, tune, and optimize the low-level Rust services that power traders and financial institutions
Design systems for low-latency environments where microseconds matter
Lead cross-team initiatives to identify and eliminate systemic performance bottlenecks
Own foundational systems end-to-end and keep them simple, reliable, and easy to operate
Mentor engineers and raise the bar on performance engineering and operational rigor