Founding Design Engineer
Founding Design Engineer at Helium — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Helium
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 150000–200000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
Helium is building Self-Improving Software: AI that automatically generates & tests new software experiences to lift revenue. We’re…
Talent-dense (8 people, 6 engineers, 75% ex-founders)
Well-funded ($6M from Google & Leaders from OpenAI)
Fast-growing (Serving tens of millions of AI experiences per day for top consumer companies).
AI has created a once-in-history opportunity, and we’re here to win, because of that…
🔴 We work hard — In-Office Monday–Friday + often push through weekends 🔴
What You’ll Do
Own design across Helium’s entire AI Experience generation product, including…
Design and implement end-to-end user flows including…
Using Helium’s AI editor to generate new in-app experiences
Running experiments and automatically analyzing results
Receiving and critiquing auto-generated experiences
Help engineers think through UX challenges and critique / uplevel design generally
Build out a visual identity and a design system
Work directly with the founders to help build out our team.
Talk to customers every week about how to simplify and improve our product
Wearing a lot more hats than listed above 👷.
What We’re Looking For
You should be a designer-who-codes (or an engineer with taste)
1-4+ years as a product designer, frontend engineer, or similar role combining design and implementation
Deep expertise in modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, modern CSS)
Excellent design taste and a keen eye for detail
Track record of making complex user flows intuitive (Making “The simple simple and the complex possible”)
Nice To Haves
Experience designing interfaces for AI products or ML-powered features
Experience optimizing frontend performance and reducing latency
Experience with brand, visual design, or creating design systems.
Founder experience
Reasons This Role Might Not Be A Fit
You’d like to spend weeks perfecting every experience
You avoid Cursor or AI coding tools.
You don’t want to talk to customers or figure out the end-to-end plan for features.
Requirements
🔴 Note 🔴
This is a full-time, in-person role based in San Francisco - we work from the office 6 days a week (Mon-Sat)
You must be based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate before starting.
We require US work authorization, but are open to O-1 visa sponsorship for truly exceptional candidates.
Our stack:
Next.js (React/Typescript), Zustand
AI (vercel) SDK
Tailwind/Shadcn
Supabase
Clickhouse
Golang/Fly.io
Mobile: Swift, Flutter, Expo, Android
Requires Bachelors degree or higher in Computer Science or similar fields.