Staff Backend Engineer, Historical APIs: Helius

This is not a Web Backend role. This is a Database & Distributed Systems role.

Helius is the AWS of Solana. They provide the RPC nodes, APIs, and data access that companies like Coinbase and Phantom use. The specific challenge of this role is "The Historical Problem." Solana produces an enormous amount of data (thousands of transactions per second). Storing this ledger, indexing it, and allowing users to query it with sub-100ms latency is one of the hardest engineering problems in crypto.

You are not building simple CRUD APIs. You are architecting a multi-petabyte retrieval engine. You are competing against physics and disk I/O limits.

## The Technical Stack & Challenge
The JD highlights three critical technologies that define the day-to-day work:

Rust (or C++): This is non-negotiable. You are writing bare-metal performance code. You need to understand memory management, concurrency, and how to avoid garbage collection pauses.

ClickHouse: This is the industry standard for high-throughput OLAP (Online Analytical Processing). If you are an expert in optimizing ClickHouse (sharding strategies, materialized views, merge tree engines), you are a top candidate.

RocksDB: This is the underlying storage engine for Solana itself (and many other high-performance DBs). You need to understand Log-Structured Merge-trees (LSM trees), compaction strategies, and write amplification.

## Strategic Analysis: The "Staff" Level Expectation
At the "Staff" level, Helius does not just want a coder; they want a Technical Strategist.

The Problem: "How do we scale from 2 Petabytes to 20 Petabytes without query times slowing down?"

Your Job: You identify the bottlenecks in the architecture. You decide whether to rewrite the ingestion pipeline or change the database schema.

Influence: You will be mentoring senior engineers. You need to be able to explain why a specific caching strategy will fail at scale before the team wastes a month building it.

## Candidate Profile: The "Systems Plumber"
They are explicitly not requiring deep Web3/Blockchain experience ("Nice to Have"). They are requiring:

7+ Years in Systems: You likely worked at a company dealing with massive data ingestion (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, Cloudflare, Uber, or High-Frequency Trading).

Database Internals: You know how a B-Tree differs from an LSM Tree. You understand how an index is actually stored on a disk.

Latency Obsession: You know the difference between network latency and disk latency, and you know how to profile a system to find the "long tail" requests.

## Why Helius?
Critical Infrastructure: If Helius goes down, a large portion of the Solana ecosystem effectively goes blind. The impact of your work is immediate and massive.

The Founders: Helius is known for being extremely engineering-forward and "no-nonsense." Their manifesto (mentioned in the JD) likely emphasizes speed, directness, and high agency.

Solana Momentum: Solana is currently the highest-throughput blockchain in common use. Solving data problems here is the bleeding edge of the industry.