Founding Software Engineer

Company: Helicon
Location: Los Angeles CA (on-site 5 days per week at a 36000 sq ft facility in Florence; relocation support available)
Compensation: $140000 - $.2% - 1.0% equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: Not available; must meet ITAR requirements

Helicons mission is to accelerate the worlds 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.

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.

• Build Argos Helicons 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.

• 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

• Manufacturing software data engineering CAD computational geometry or simulation experience

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.