Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer

Company: Helicon
Location: Los Angeles, CA (on-site 5 days per week at a 36,000 sq ft facility in Florence; relocation support available)
Compensation: $140,000 - $200,000 + 0.2% - 1.0% equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Not available; must meet ITAR requirements

About Helicon

Helicon's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to advanced materials, combining AI software, robotics and full-stack manufacturing to industrialize advanced composite materials for defense and aerospace.

Helicon has raised a $16.5M seed and is scaling a composite manufacturing facility toward 1M frames per year.

The Role

Helicon is hiring high-agency, full-stack Founding Software Engineers (2+ years of production shipping) excited to work where software meets the physical world. You will work as an individual contributor alongside world-class hardware and automation engineers, with no ticket queues and no dedicated PM or QA: you find what matters, own it end to end and ship fast.

What You Will Do

• Build Argos, Helicon's custom operating system for everything from raw material to finished part: supply chain, quoting, pricing, inventory and operational flow.
• Develop Argos Sim, the simulation layer that post-trains AI models on factory-floor data to predict how composite parts behave.
• Own factory automation software: ingest real-time equipment telemetry, orchestrate robotics and build a 24/7 digital twin of the production line.
• Design backend systems that mirror the physical world, in the style of a Palantir ontology applied to a manufacturing facility.

What You Bring

• 2+ years shipping production software across a TypeScript frontend and a Python or Go backend
• A record of building end-to-end products
• Comfort in fast-moving, ambiguous environments with full autonomy
• Excitement about software for physical manufacturing
• US person status (ITAR); ability to work on-site in Los Angeles 5 days a week

Nice to Have

• Manufacturing software, data engineering, CAD, computational geometry or simulation experience

Tech Stack

TypeScript, Python, Go, CAD, computational geometry, 3D environments, digital twin, robotics/sensor integration, AI/ML post-training and simulation

REVENUE: 17.5% of first-year salary. Est. fee per hire $25K-$35K; 3 seat(s) = up to $89K if all filled.

TARGET COMPANIES (suggested): Palantir, Hadrian, Anduril, SpaceX, Relativity Space, Machina Labs.

BEST-FIT CANDIDATE: 2+ yrs; full-stack TS + Python/Go; end-to-end products; visa: NO sponsorship; ITAR US person; location: LA 5 days.