Founding Product Engineer

About the role

ABOUT HELMGUARD We're building agent-native risk infrastructure: risk management and trust building, delivered by AI agents, for a world increasingly run by them. As more decisions and transactions run through agents, the volume of risk to manage and trust to establish is growing very fast. Today both functions are fragmented, split across internal teams, point products, and outside consultants, and rebuilt from scratch whenever someone needs an answer. HelmGuard brings them onto one platform and runs them continuously: our agents sit on top of proprietary data and reassess as conditions change, rather than at fixed checkpoints. So our customers spend their time deciding and acting on what matters, not assembling the evidence to get there. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent across risk management and trust building annually. These funds are going to be reallocated to agent-native solutions in the next five years, and we will capture that spend. We've grown to seven-figure revenue within months of product launch, on the back of multi-year contracts with leading enterprises in financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare. Our founders come from Palantir and academic institutions: Oxford, Stanford, and ETH. We're backed by UK and US institutional investors and angel investors from Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Palantir, and SpaceX. We're hiring across founding-team roles for people who want outsize impact, the influence over direction and culture that comes only from joining this early, and pre-Series A equity upside. YOUR IMPACT Most of what a customer experiences of HelmGuard, you'll have built. You turn ideas into shipped product faster than anyone expects, across the whole stack, and you decide what's worth building as much as you build it. We're betting that AI collapses the cost of writing software and you're the proof that the bottleneck was never the code, it was the judgment about what to make. THE ROLE You are not expecting to be handed a finished spec and you own outcomes, not tickets. You understand our platform and what our customers want, and you decide what is actually worth building, design it, and ship it end-to-end: the interface someone loves to use, the API behind it, and the agent-powered feature underneath it. Some weeks, that's a polished onboarding flow; some weeks, it's the data model for a new analytical engine; some weeks, it's wiring an agent into a customer's workflow. You're at your best when the work refuses to sit in one lane. The bar isn't that the code is clean, but rather that you built the right thing, customers feel it, and it shipped while the problem was still worth solving. You make all three true, with Claude Code as a force multiplier that lets you move at a pace that once required a team. WHAT YOU WILL DO - Ship customer-facing product end to end — frontend, backend, and the agent-powered features in between - Own features from "is this even worth building?" through design, build, and the messy reality of customers using them - Work close to customers and FDEs, and turn what you hear straight into shipped product - Bring product and design taste — you care how it feels, not just whether it compiles - Move fast with Claude Code and the rest of the AI tooling we run, without shipping anything you'd be embarrassed to take into a security review - Leave the codebase better than you found it as you move through it WHAT YOU BRING - 6+ years shipping production software across the stack in a small, fast-moving team — TypeScript ideally, or an adjacent stack with the appetite to switch - A track record you can point to: things you decided on, built, and watched customers actually use - Genuine product instinct — you can tell the difference between impressive and useful, and you optimise for useful - Front-to-back range: a React UI a customer enjoys, and the API and data model that make it real - AI-native working style: Claude Code is already in your daily loop, and you have opinions about where it earns its keep and where it doesn't - High agency — you see the gap, you close it, you don't wait to be told NICE TO HAVE - Real design chops — you can make something look and feel right, not just function - Experience folding LLM features into a product (agents, AI-fill, that class of work) - B2B SaaS, GRC, security, or another domain where the user is a professional with zero patience for friction - Early-stage or founding-team experience CULTURE AND VALUES We value a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We also hold a small set of core beliefs that reflect how we operate, and share them transparently with candidates so the fit is clear from the outset. Put Customers First. Our customers buy outcomes from us, not features. We judge every decision by whether it delivers on that promise. Take Ownership. Founding-stage means problems don't come pre-scoped. You see something that needs doing, scope it, ship it, own the outcome. We expect this from everyone, and provide you the backing to execute on it. Work Hard, With Gratitude. This is the most consequential window for building enterprise software in a generation. We work hard because the opportunity is rare, and we do it with gratitude for the moment, for the people we get to build it with, and for the customers willing to bet on us this early. Say the Silly Thing. The best ideas usually start out sounding half-baked, so we'd rather you say the silly thing than sit on it. We want you opinionated and willing to argue, and just as willing to change your mind when someone makes a better case. Disagreement here is a contribution, not a risk. WORKING AT HELMGUARD Location. King's Cross, London (Gridiron building). We're built around in-person collaboration and expect most days to be in-office, with flexibility for the days that need it. Compensation. Top decile for the London market, with meaningful EMI-eligible options. Perks. Daily team lunch and specialty coffee, a roof terrace overlooking King's Cross, on-site showers for those who enjoy active commuting, and serious per-engineer AI tooling and API budgets. Interview process. Three stages: behavioural phone screen, technical phone screen, and a paid on-site work trial. Target turnaround is under two weeks from first conversation. Tech Stack. TypeScript, Node.js, React, Tailwind, OpenAPI, Express, Azure (Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID), Postgres, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker. Anthropic-first AI with in-house evals and scaffolding. Claude Code throughout.