Founding Design Engineer

United States only: remote today, with eventual relocation as the team centralizes. Full-time. Reports to the co-founders.

Own how Helmsted looks, feels and works for wealth advisors of complex households, and ship it yourself in production code.

About Helmsted

Advisors use Helmsted for financial planning, tax and estate analysis, meetings and their client portal, and our goal is to replace a firm's entire tech stack. We are a small team, live with pilot firms and shipping every day.

The role

You will sit alongside our engineers and own everything an advisor and their clients see. You design a screen and build it in our real codebase, so ideas reach pilot firms in days, not sprints. As more of the work is done by agents, your job is to make that work easy to review, trust and act on: an advisor should understand what Helmsted did, why, and what it needs from them at a glance.

What you'll do

Design and ship product UI end to end in our React and TypeScript codebase, through code review, to production

Design how advisors work with agents: drafts, sources, confidence, approvals, undo and hand-offs back to a person

Build and own our design system and component library so every new screen ships faster and stays consistent

Make dense financial data (households, accounts, entities, tax and estate detail) clear on desktop and usable on a phone

Prototype in code to test ideas with pilot advisors, then turn the winners into production features

Raise the bar on polish: interaction, motion, empty and error states, accessibility and speed

Work directly with advisors at our pilot firms, watch them use Helmsted, and fix the friction they hit

What you bring

A portfolio of products you designed and built yourself that real people use

Strong product design fundamentals: layout, typography, hierarchy, interaction and taste

Production front-end skill: React, TypeScript, modern CSS, component libraries, git and pull requests

Comfort working in a shared codebase: you read existing code, change it safely, and know when to pull in an engineer

Pro-AI: you build through AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor and similar) almost every day, with the judgment to check and fix what they produce

Opinions on how AI products should show their work: streaming, citations, uncertainty and human approval

High agency: you find the problem, decide with imperfect information and ship

Nice to have

Fintech or wealthtech experience, or design work on dense, data-heavy professional tools

Building or owning a design system at a startup

Design for agent or AI-native products

Data visualization and reporting design (client reports, dashboards, charts)

Mobile and responsive design for professional users

Why Helmsted

Founding equity and real ownership of the product and how it feels

Start remote from anywhere in the United States

Every frontier model and AI tool you need, covered

Work directly with the founders and our pilot firms, and see advisors use what you ship the same week

Pay and benefits

Base salary: $150,000–$175,000

Equity: Early-team grant, sized by experience

Benefits: Paid sick leave; health insurance and a 401(k) are under discussion but not offered yet

AI tools: All covered

Applications: Accepted on an ongoing basis

Background check: Final offers are contingent on a background check

How to apply

Skip the cover letter. Email [email protected] with a portfolio or live links at the top and short answers to these three questions; bullets and screenshots are fine. Use AI to help you answer, and tell us how you did.

Most of our code is written by AI agents. How would you keep the design system and the shipped product consistent, so agents produce correct UI by default and drift gets caught when they don’t?

Managing views and components is harder in AI products than in the software that came before them. Much of the work happens in the background (agents running, results streaming, data refreshing) instead of being driven by the user. How do you think about this problem, and how would you make sure we know every view a user can experience?

Walk us through how you’d take a feature from idea to merged code. How do you separate UI from state from behavior, and how do you keep what the user sees in sync with what’s actually happening on the server, including optimistic updates and rollbacks when an action fails?

Add a resume or LinkedIn, plus a GitHub if you have one. We move fast.

Helmsted, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates on merit and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, or disability.