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 Apply here on Wellfound with a portfolio or live links, and answer the questions below. Short answers are fine; bullets and screenshots are welcome. Use AI to help you answer, and tell us how you did. 1. 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? 2. 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? 3. 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.