Staff Backend Engineer, Gatekeeper

You will own and evolve Gatekeeper, Helius’s high-performance edge gateway and middleware layer. You will lead architectural decisions across routing, connection management, backpressure, and observability. You will design and implement routing and load balancing strategies, improve connection handling (TLS, keepalives, pooling, timeouts, streaming), and build operator-friendly observability including SLOs, dashboards, and alerts. You will define and enforce contracts with internal service teams, drive security and abuse hardening, own production operations (incident response, on-call, runbooks), and mentor engineers to raise performance and operational rigor.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction for Gatekeeper with emphasis on p50 and p99 latency and tail reliability
• Design and implement routing and load balancing strategies across regions and backend pools including failover and graceful degradation
• Improve end-to-end connection handling including TLS termination keepalives pooling timeouts backpressure and request/response streaming
• Build operator-friendly observability including SLOs dashboards alerts and health views
• Partner with internal service teams to define and enforce contracts timeouts retries error mapping and capacity signals
• Drive hardening work across security and abuse controls including auth behavior rate limiting and request validation
• Own production operations for Gatekeeper including incident response on-call improvements runbooks and post-incident follow-through
• Mentor engineers and improve performance engineering operational rigor and code quality

Requirements

• Significant experience building and operating high-throughput backend systems in production such as proxies gateways distributed services or infra-heavy platforms
• Deep understanding of networking fundamentals and HTTP behavior including TLS TCP connection reuse proxies load balancers and timeouts
• Strong performance engineering skills including profiling and benchmarking and making latency throughput tradeoffs
• Proven track record leading ambiguous cross-team projects and shipping durable systems
• Operational excellence with on-call ownership and improving runability of services
• Excellent communication including writing clear design docs and aligning stakeholders

Benefits

• Remote-first flexible work
• Meaningful equity
• Generous vacation
• Wellness budgets
• Support for learning and travel