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