Founding Engineer

Helicon is accelerating the world's transition to advanced materials. It combines AI software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing to industrialize composites (carbon fiber), doing for composites what Carnegie and Bethlehem did for steel. Composites today are exquisite, expensive, and slow (lead times up to a year, largely confined to F1 and fighter jets). Helicon aims to collapse cost and lead time by an order of magnitude, unlocking a much larger market: drone structures (especially defense), naval vessels, humanoid robotics, with parts that are stronger, lighter, and infinitely customizable. It is backed by the investors who were first believers in Applied Intuition, Valar Atomics, Factory, Astranis, Flock Safety, and Relativity Space, at a ~$100M post-money valuation.

The deeper bet: Helicon is the only industrial company building the dataset to accurately simulate, then predict and program, what composites do in the physical world. That makes it a technology company rather than a lab or a legacy manufacturer. Seed stage, about 1 to 10 people, founded in 2026. Based in Los Angeles.

Helicon is hiring founding software engineers. Figure out what actually matters, take the 80% path, and ship it fast without burning out. There is essentially no off-the-shelf software for this, so you build from scratch across three surfaces. Argos is the OS from raw material to finished part: supply chain, quoting, pricing, a relational ERP plus manufacturing execution system. Argos Sim is CAD automation, DFM for composites, mold generation and simulation, and medium-term post-trained quantized physics/surrogate models that turn week-long simulations into minutes. Factory automation ingests real-time equipment and sensor telemetry into a 24/7 digital twin. You work beside world-class hardware engineers with full autonomy.

This is hands-on and physical. You go to the factory floor, talk to operators, and make their life better. Slope over intercept: how good and how hungry matters more than years. Speed and urgency are core. You own problems end to end. There is no dedicated PM, QA, or design layer, and no stack of review rounds before you ship.

Bar: 2+ years shipping production software at scale (frontend TypeScript, backend Python or Go). You have built complex relational systems from scratch (ERP, MES, logistics, Palantir-style encoding of reality into data). You are comfortable starting from zero, not plastering onto an existing tool. Bonus: manufacturing processes, CAD, computational geometry, 3D, high-bandwidth telemetry, model post-training or quantization. Physical-world exposure (robotics, aerospace) is a plus. Onsite in Los Angeles. Equity is about 0.1% to 1%. Visa sponsorship is limited. Meals covered, the company pays for tools that make you faster.