Design Engineer.

About the role

We're looking for a founding Design Engineer to set the bar for product and craft at Helm. You'll sit at the intersection of design and engineering, someone who cares as much about pixel-perfect details as about shipped, working product. You'll own the full arc from visual concept to production code.

You'll be our first design hire. You'll shape our design language, build our design system, and translate our brand into a cohesive product experience across every surface. You'll work directly with the founding team and have the autonomy to make consequential design decisions from day one.

The person who'll succeed in this role has exceptional taste, a deep commitment to craft, and relentless curiosity. You study products, interfaces, motion, tools, and patterns because you can't help yourself. You're excited by the challenge of making financial software feel fast, elegant, precise, and alive.

What you'll do

• Own product craft across Helm's core experiences, including dashboards, forecasting, planning, onboarding, navigation, tables, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Build and evolve Helm's design system, including tokens, components, interaction patterns, motion, and layout. Make sure it works well across our stack (React, TypeScript, and Material UI).
• Turn early ideas, customer problems, and product direction into polished, production-ready interfaces.
• Make financial density feel effortless, so founders can understand their business in seconds.
• Design for motion, responsiveness, and complex interactions. Prototype in code when Figma is too slow or too static.
• Use AI tools to accelerate design and implementation while maintaining consistency and quality.
• Join customer conversations and translate insights into product improvements.
• Partner closely with the founders, bringing clear opinions, alternatives, and strong design judgment.

Who we're looking for

• Exceptional taste and a deep commitment to craft.
• Strong product judgment, grounded in customer needs.
• Comfort moving between design exploration and production code.
• You genuinely enjoy both design and building, and you treat them as one continuous piece of work.
• A bias toward shipping. You can move quickly without lowering the bar.

Qualifications

• Advanced proficiency in Figma or comparable product design tools.
• Experience building and evolving design systems.
• Experience designing dense, data-rich interfaces.
• Experience using motion, gestures, and complex interactions to reduce cognitive load.
• Frontend fluency in React, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS. You understand how modern web interfaces are built and can carry your designs into production, pairing with our CTO on the deepest technical work.
• Fluency with AI coding tools and agents (Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor).

Life at Helm

• Ground floor, for real. You'll be Helm's first design hire, working directly with the founders. Your work will shape the product and set the standard for what follows.
• A role with a future. The role begins as a paid contract, with the opportunity to convert to a full-time Founding Design Engineer position.
• Room to grow. As Helm scales, so will your role, responsibilities, and compensation.
• Flexibility that works. Remote friendly.

How to apply

Send us your portfolio, including relevant case studies and links to shipped work. Include a brief note about something you built with AI tools, what you learned, and what you would do differently. Tell us why building an AI CFO interests you.