Founding Designer
Boston · Remote possible
About Helios
Helios is the human enhancement company. Almost all of medicine today is reactive, which means it waits for disease to appear and then tries to treat whatever shows up. We think the interesting problem is the opposite one: seeing trouble early enough to do something about it. That takes a kind of data the healthcare system has never collected, and we decided the only way to get it was to build the instrument ourselves. No one has built this before, and we think it is the largest opportunity in healthcare: the chance to build what medicine should have been all along.
That instrument is an at-home panel measuring over 1,000 biomarkers from a single draw, which makes it the highest-resolution at-home diagnostic available anywhere. The test is where we start, not where we stop. Around it we are building the brand, the platform, and the products that we expect will make Helios a household name in health, the company millions of people trust to live longer and better. Each draw becomes part of a longitudinal dataset connecting a member's biomarkers with their wearable data, their labs, their records, and how they actually live. We use that dataset to train the Helios Foundation Model, which today simulates physiology and predicts disease risk, and which we intend eventually to design interventions outright. The first of those interventions go on sale this year, and every one we sell will send outcome data back into the model.
The three founders are Harvard Medical School physician-scientists (two of us helped pioneer CRISPR diagnostics) with backgrounds running from longevity research and computational biology through clinical practice and drug development. We are well-capitalized, and we are building a consumer company first. The products fund the data, the data compounds into models no competitor can train, and those models become our deepest moat. We are not improving the healthcare that exists. We are reinventing it, building a new kind of platform and the company that millions of people trust to monitor and run their health.
The role
You would be employee number one, and the owner of how Helios looks, feels, and reads everywhere someone meets it. We believe brand is the single most important asset a consumer company builds, and we intend to build ours the way Apple and Nike built theirs, as the thing people trust before they read a single spec. You would be the person who makes that real.
This is a making role rather than a managing one. You would define the brand system and then build with it yourself: the websites that sell, the app members open every day, and the report they read on results day. The founders bring the science and the medicine, and our founding engineer brings the systems. You bring the feel, and you make it convert.
What you'll own
Six areas, although in practice they are one job: everything a member sees and touches.
1. The brand system
You define the identity and the system that carries it, which means typography, color, layout, motion, voice, and photography. The bar is that a member could recognize Helios with the logo covered. Taste lives in your head, but the system has to live on paper, documented well enough that everything we ship looks like it came from the same hand.
2. Websites that convert
You own the marketing site and every landing page on it, and they exist to sell. Beautiful work that does not convert is decoration, so you will watch the numbers, run the tests, and learn what moves a visitor from curious to customer. You will have real traffic to learn from early.
3. The web and mobile apps
Membership lives across two surfaces, a web app and a mobile app, and you own both. Onboarding, results day, and the daily loop of tracking and acting on the data have to feel like one product whether a member is digging into their biomarkers on a laptop or checking in from their phone. You design the flows, states, and surfaces for each, decide what belongs where, and work shoulder to shoulder with our founding engineer to ship them without anything getting lost in translation.
4. The report
The report is the product's moment of truth. A member opens it and learns what their biology says, so it has to be legible and honest about uncertainty, and beautiful enough that people screenshot it. This is information design at its hardest: more than a thousand biomarkers distilled into something a person reads in bed at seven in the morning and acts on.
5. The physical brand
Helios arrives in the mail. The test kit, the packaging, and the products sitting on a counter are all surfaces you art-direct, because the unboxing is the first proof a member gets that this company is different.
6. Shipped for real, not just mocked up
We expect you to make things rather than mockups. The best designers simply get more done than seems possible: they take a landing page from idea to live, stand up a working app demo, and produce a quarter's worth of creative in a week, and we want the person who already works that way. Figma still matters here, but shipping matters more. AI is a default part of how we work here, not a side experiment, and we expect you to use it to raise your ceiling rather than lower the bar. What leaves your hands should be better for how you used it, never noisier, and you stay the last line of quality. We don’t accept AI slop, hallucinations, or artifacts, and we will never let anything but human taste be the final judge.
Who you are
We are hiring one extraordinary designer, not filling a role. The bar is simply the best person we can find. Show us work that shipped and sold, because that will count for more than agency names or titles. Specifically, we are looking for:
- Consumer work you can point to that real customers used and bought from
- Visual craft at the level where typography, color, and spacing decisions all have reasons you can articulate
- Evidence your design moves numbers, whether that is conversion on a landing page or retention in an app
- Real product design depth, meaning flows, states, and information hierarchy, beyond brand surfaces
- A making process fast enough to produce working websites and app demos on your own
- Enough front-end ability to ship a page yourself, in whatever tool you prefer
- The pace to carry a startup's entire design load alone, and the judgment to pick what matters this week
- Self-direction from a vague brief to a finished, shipped thing
- Energized by ambiguity rather than slowed by it, comfortable defining what good looks like before anyone else has
- A degree in design, HCI, fine arts, or a related field, or equivalent skill you taught yourself. Your portfolio matters far more than the credential, but we want to see the foundations
Nice to have
- Health, science, or another trust-sensitive category in your portfolio
- Motion design, 3D, or photography art direction
- Packaging or physical product work
- Performance creative experience for DTC brands
- A public body of work we can browse before we ever talk
Who thrives here
The designers who do well in a company this small treat taste as a responsibility rather than a preference, and they can defend a choice without getting precious about it. They want their work measured, because they believe good design sells, and they would rather ship something strong today than something perfect in three weeks. They get the work of a full studio out of themselves alone, multiplying output without lowering the bar. They take the brand personally, and they want to build something people will recognize for decades, with the patience to get there one shipped thing at a time. They run hot and move fast, and they expect the early years of something this ambitious to ask a great deal of them.
Why this role
The honest case for this role is that almost nobody gets to do this. The brands we all admire were shaped by a small number of people very early, and that is the position on offer here: the whole identity of a company that intends to be generational, defined by you, with no committee above you and the founders as your only review. Your work goes live in your first weeks, and if we succeed, the brand everyone recognizes will be the one you built. Your compensation will include meaningful equity ownership. You would build this as an owner, with a real stake in what it becomes.
Details
Commitment: Full-time
Location: Boston preferred. We would love to have you in person with the founders and can help cover relocation, but we are open to remote for the right person.
Compensation: Meaningful equity ownership. You will own a real piece of what you build
How to apply
Send your portfolio and the shipped thing you are proudest of to hello@heliosinc.xyz, along with a few sentences on what it did for the business and how you use AI tools in your work. Send your CV or résumé along with it. The work tells us the most, but we want to see the full picture.
The bar is high and we will hold it, but do not screen yourself out. If you are not sure you meet every line above and you suspect you might be exceptional, write to us anyway and let us be the judge.
Helios is an equal-opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by applicable law, and we welcome applicants from every background.
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