Platform Engineering Lead

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

This is the lead role for Platform at Helius. Reporting to the Co-founder/Head of Engineering, you'll build and lead the team that owns the foundation under everything we ship: our bare metal fleet, how software gets built and deployed, observability, reliability, and engineering security.

Our products carry real traffic and real revenue, and our customers include trading firms and wallets with no tolerance for downtime. Your job is to make reliability a discipline rather than a heroic effort. That means SLOs and error budgets, a real incident process, blameless postmortems, and automation that removes toil instead of documenting it. If Google's SRE book is a reference point for how you think teams should operate, you'll feel at home here.

This is a hands-on lead role. You'll set direction and grow the team. You'll also stay close enough to the systems to make the hard technical calls and ship when it matters. No crypto background is required.

What You'll Do

• Set the Platform roadmap and own outcomes across bare metal, builds and deployments, observability, SRE, security, and node operations
• Build our SRE practice: SLOs, alerting standards, incident command, on-call health, postmortems, and incident automation
• Lead our observability overhaul: migrate off Datadog onto ClickHouse and Grafana, and raise the bar on visibility across every service
• Standardize how we build and deploy software to machines, so shipping is fast, safe, and consistent across teams
• Partner with our security lead to plan and execute the engineering security roadmap
• Drive fleet strategy, including capacity planning, provider relationships, and cost analysis
• Hire, mentor, and grow Platform engineers, and set the team's operating norms in a remote, async-heavy environment
• Work closely with product engineering teams (Data Streaming, Historical APIs, Gatekeeper, and others) so Platform accelerates them rather than gating them

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering, including time as a tech lead or engineering manager
• Deep experience running production infrastructure at scale, with meaningful bare metal experience
• A track record of building SRE practices, such as SLOs, incident management, and postmortem culture, not just participating in them
• Strong observability depth, including metrics, logs, and tracing, plus experience designing or migrating an observability stack
• Solid security fundamentals across access control, secrets, and infrastructure hardening
• Strong Linux, networking, and distributed systems fundamentals
• Clear written communication. Your design docs and incident reviews need to stand on their own for a remote team.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a high-scale, performance-oriented B2B infrastructure company (cloud, CDN, or edge platforms)
• Experience with ClickHouse or other high-volume observability backends
• Blockchain node operations experience
• Rust experience
• Experience building a platform team from an early stage

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 building infrastructure for internet capital markets