Software Engineer, Pipelines

Who are we?

Helix is building the intelligent data platform that modern enterprises run on. We connect, transform, and deliver data across fragmented systems — giving engineering and analytics teams a single, reliable substrate for their most critical workflows.

We work with companies that process billions of events a day and can't afford to be wrong. Our team is small by design, deeply technical, and obsessed with correctness and developer experience. If you want to own hard problems end-to-end, Helix is where you'll do the best work of your career.

As a Software Engineer on the Pipelines team, you will:

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput data ingestion pipelines serving real-time and batch workloads
• Contribute to our connector ecosystem — expanding native integrations with databases, event streams, and SaaS APIs
• Improve end-to-end pipeline reliability through better observability, alerting, and graceful degradation patterns
• Collaborate with the Query Engine and Product teams to ship data features that customers actually love
• Participate in on-call rotations and drive incidents to a clean postmortem and action items
• Review code, write design docs, and help grow junior engineers on your team
• Keep up with the ecosystem and make pragmatic bets on new tooling when the trade-offs are clear

You may be a good fit if:

• You've designed and operated distributed systems at scale — millions of events per day is a normal Tuesday for you
• You're comfortable with streaming technologies like Kafka, Flink, Spark, or something comparable
• You write clean Python and SQL, and have experience with at least one strongly-typed language (Go, Rust, Java, or Scala)
• You thrive in ambiguity and have shipped meaningful features with a lot of open questions still on the table
• You have sharp debugging instincts and genuinely enjoy tracing a gnarly bug to its root cause
• You communicate proactively — you write clearly, ask good questions, and don't let blockers linger
• You've worked in a fast-moving startup environment and know when to move fast versus when to slow down and be careful

Benefits & Perks:

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity — we want everyone to feel like an owner
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage (employee and dependents)
• $100/month wellness stipend — gym, therapy, meditation, whatever works for you
• 401(k) with 4% company match, fully vested from day one
• Unlimited PTO with a 15-day encouraged minimum and a culture that respects it
• $750 home office setup stipend for remote or hybrid employees
• $2,000 annual learning budget for courses, conferences, books, or coaching
• Quarterly team offsites and an annual company retreat

How and Where We Work:

• We're headquartered in Austin, TX with a second office in San Francisco. Remote candidates in US time zones are welcome.
• Hybrid employees come in 2–3 days/week; we reserve in-person time for collaborative work and planning sessions.
• Remote employees receive a co-working stipend to work alongside others in their city.
• All employees receive a $500 home office credit to get your workspace properly set up.
• We ship weekly and have a culture of written-first communication — async by default, synchronous when it matters.