Founding Product 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

You will build the next module or feature that our customers come to rely upon. You will own it end to end, from idea conception to database design to agent evaluations. In a world where the marginal line of code is too cheap to meter, you are the engineer with taste deciding what should be written.

The Role

As the name suggests, this role encompasses everything to do with building the product. That means that you’ll need to understand our platform and what our customers want. You’ll then use that model to decide what we should build next, and then you will go and build it, in collaboration with the rest of the engineering and forward-deployed engineering teams.

Importantly, you'll work autonomously with little guidance, so experience and agency are highly valued!

What You Will Do

• Ship customer-facing product end to end: frontend, backend, and new agents

• Own features from ideation through design, build, and customer feedback

• Leave the codebase better than you found it

• Be very curious and AI-forward. We love people who are curious and think deeply about where AI is best used in SWE

• Be security-first, ensuring properties like multi-tenant isolation

What You Bring

• 5+ years shipping production software across the stack in fast-moving teams

• Experience with TypeScript or an adjacent stack with appetite to switch

• Ability to work full-stack

• AI-native working style

• Experience folding LLM features into a product (this could be internal-facing as well)

Nice to have

• Experience in GRC, security or AI governance

• Early-stage or founding-team experience

• Real design chops

This Role Probably Isn't For You If

• You can’t explain a SaaS architecture in detail using system design principles

• You haven’t taken the chance to compare the performance of multiple LLMs on your daily coding tasks

• You haven’t tried to solve a problem with the current coding scaffolds (like Claude Code)

• You’ve only shipped frontend or backend (not both)

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.