Head of Security
Helius · North America
Extracted from the posting
First Head of Security at Helius, reporting to the COO and Head of Engineering, owning security hands-on across infrastructure, cloud, and bare metal production systems. Responsibilities include incident response, identity and secrets management, third-party risk, compliance roadmap, and building a future security team. Requires 8+ years in security and a strong engineering background.
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 hiring our first Head of Security. You’ll own security across Helius and lead it hands-on: doing the work yourself across our engineering platform while building toward a team. You’ll report to our COO and Head of Engineering, and our leadership team will depend on you to understand, manage, and make clear calls on risk.
Your priorities are to establish a strong security posture across our engineering platform and to own incident response. You’ll have real authority and a clear mandate to protect a company operating critical infrastructure at scale.
What You'll Do
- Lead security at Helius, setting direction and owning execution across infrastructure, cloud, and production systems
- Own incident response end to end: detection, response, runbooks, on-call readiness, and regular tabletop exercises
- Establish a strong security posture across our engineering platform, including identity and access management, secrets and key management, network segmentation, logging, monitoring, and detection
- Review and manage third-party and supply-chain risk
- Partner with engineering to embed security into how we build and ship, without becoming a bottleneck
- Lead our compliance roadmap and respond to customer security reviews
- Hire, develop, and grow the security team as we scale
- Own the security strategy and roadmap, and maintain our threat model and risk register, prioritizing against real risk
- Communicate clearly about risk with executives, engineers, and customers
What We're Looking For
- 8+ years in security, including experience securing high-availability, internet-facing infrastructure at scale
- Strong engineering skills: you read and write code and can dig into systems yourself
- Deep expertise in cloud security, bare metal and production environments
- Hands-on experience with detection and response, and you’ve led through a real security incident
- Experience building a security program or significantly scaling a security function
- Experience securing developer products, APIs, or platforms
- Strong grasp of secrets and key management
- Comfortable moving fast, iterating, and making good decisions under pressure
- Pragmatic and high-ownership: you do the work and don’t wait for a large team or established tooling
- Clear communicator who can partner with engineers and say no without being a blocker
- Comfortable working in a fully remote, async-friendly team
Nice to Have
- Experience leading a SOC 2 or similar audit
- Prior security leadership at a high-growth startup
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 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.
