Founding Design Engineer at Helium (S24)
$150K - $200K  •  0.50% - 1.00%
Self Improving Software
San Francisco, CA, US
Full-time
US citizen/visa only
1+ years
About Helium
  • Helium is building Self-Improving Software:
    • Our vision is AI that automatically generates & tests new experiences to lift revenue.
    • To start, we’re automating onboarding flows for mobile apps & quickly expanding to new surfaces.
  • We're an extremely talent-dense team
    • 3/4 of the team previously founded companies
    • All 3 cofounders have ML degrees
    • Generated $Xb in revenue growth for our previous companies.
  • We're scaling quickly
    • Servers have been on fire since launch this Summer
    • We power tens of millions of AI experience for top consumer companies
    • Backed by >$5M from Y Combinator, Google’s AI fund, and leaders from OpenAI
  • Benefits
    • Build on the newest AI models, even before they're released publicly
    • Work with a stellar hard-working team at a prime office in SF
    • All meals (Breakfast, lunch, dinner) while working and gym/transport covered.
About the 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 in-person in our SF office 6 days per week (Mon-Sat). 🔴

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.

Technology

Here are the technical problems you're solving:

RL for software personalization - dynamic assignment of price, paywalls, and experiences to different users based on what improves metrics

Automated a/b testing - building systems that automatically chooses and runs new paywall experiments to run based on analytics + codegen models

AI editor - think Bolt/Lovable for paywalls

Billion scale content serving - we're building a python service to process thousands of QPS that serving assets to millions of phones daily → soon to be billions

Mobile webview optimization - building a webview layer that feels native across 4 mobile stacks

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