Forward Deployed Engineer

About HelmGuard

We're building governance and security infrastructure for a world of increasingly capable and widely proliferated agents.

The world is undergoing a fundamental shift: every day more work is being done autonomously by AI. This is true for enterprises but also for the adversarial actors who seek to disrupt their operations through cyber attacks. The only way to keep up is to use AI intelligently to govern internal deployments and defend against offensive threats. HelmGuard will be the platform which businesses use to do both.

We've grown to seven-figure revenue within 9 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 leading UK and US institutional investors and exceptional angels from Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Palantir, SpaceXAI, and more.

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.

Non-Negotiables

• In-office 4 days a week (with flexibility for things like school drop-off)

• Wanting to own outcomes and to take on the hours required to do so

• Having an existing right to work in the UK (we do provide visa support for applicants already working in the country)

Your Impact

In this technical role, you'll be the critical node for the success of our customers’ work with the platform. Once a customer signs, it's on you to make their experience with the platform as positive as possible. You will also use this alongside a deep understanding of the technical makeup of the platform to suggest new features and complete basic engineering work. The customers you make successful in year one become the basis of everything we build in year three.

The Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), you own the technical delivery of our platform to enterprise customers. You’ll need to get your hands dirty with related development. You're the first person our customers call and their trusted counterpart. You sit across the table from CSOs, VPs of Risk, heads of compliance, and you turn their messiest workflows into something that runs on our platform, raising any technical issues as you go along.

Our platform is user-friendly, but we find great value in staying close to customers and understanding their needs. Expect roughly one to two customer meetings per week per account, plus the async technical work around it: configuring the platform, chasing requirements, helping decide what features to implement and implementing them, and keeping things moving. You'll own a dozen-plus accounts at any given time.

This is the closest thing we have to a founding-team role outside the founders. You’ll be partnering directly with our CTO to help shape what the company becomes.

What You Will Do

• Configure the platform to fit each customer's needs

• Manage the async cadence: emails, follow-ups, status updates, internal escalations

• Translate customer needs into prioritised product feedback, balancing our vision for the platform and week-to-week requests

• Ship code. When a customer needs a UI fix, a small feature, or a bug squashed, you do it.

• Take the lead on resolving urgent customer-facing issues

Nice To Have

• 2–5 years of experience doing something tough/challenging and impressive

• Real commercial instinct: you've sold, negotiated, or owned customer outcomes in a way you can point to

• Solutions architect, deployment strategist, customer engineer, or similar background at a technical enterprise company

• Experience at a Series A/B enterprise startup (GRC, cyber or legal tech in particular)

• Background in risk, compliance, or financial services

• Experience in software development

Who We Typically Hire For This Role

• Ambitious candidates with a STEM background (mathematics, computer science, physics, etc.) who are interested in working with people

• Existing SWEs looking for a shift to more customer work

This Role Probably Isn't For You If

• You have only worked in consulting and not needed to maintain a product

• You prefer to be on the selling side rather than building

• You want to own the relationship but not the implementation

• You haven’t worked with current AI coding tools

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 with the backing to execute on it.

Work Hard, With Gratitude. This is the most consequential window ever for building a business. 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 put a large value on in-person collaboration. Our default policy is 4 days a week in-office, with one day remote (i.e. 4+1).

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, but we also use Codex and are open to other scaffolds.

Relocation. We are not currently in a position to help candidates relocate to London from outside the country if they require visa sponsorship to do so. We can help candidates who already hold a UK visa transfer it to us.