Telecommut
Helios is the human enhancement company. For its entire history, medicine has been a reaction: it waits for something to break, then scrambles to name it and fix it. We think that is backwards. We are building the company that lets people understand their own health early and clearly, while there is still everything to do about it.
We are pioneering a way for anyone to profile their health from home at a depth that was, until now, inconceivable. From a single sample we read the body in extraordinary resolution, and we are building the intelligence that turns that signal into a clear picture of what is happening inside a person and what is coming. The first products go on sale this year, and every one we ship makes the picture sharper. Nothing like this has existed before, and we believe it is the largest opportunity in healthcare: the chance to build what medicine should have been all along.
Helios was founded by three Harvard Medical School physician-scientists, including pioneers of CRISPR diagnostics, with backgrounds across longevity, computational biology, clinical medicine, and drug development. We are well-capitalized and building a consumer company first. The products fund the data, the data compounds into intelligence no one else can build, and together they become the platform that millions of people will trust to run their health. We are not improving the healthcare that exists. We are building what it should have been.
The role
You would be one of our first hires, and the person who gives Helios its look and feel 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. The brand direction comes from the founders, and you are the one who turns it into something real and makes it convert. This is a making role rather than a managing one. You would shape the brand system together with the founders and then build with it yourself, across both Helios and Roon, our consumer brand launching now: the websites that sell, the app members open every day, the report they read on results day, and the marketing creative that brings people in. 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 Will Own
Seven areas, although in practice they are one job: everything a member sees and touches.
- The brand system
- Websites that convert
- The web and mobile apps
- The report
- The physical brand
- Shipped for real, not just mocked up
- Marketing creative, across Helios and Roon
Requirements
Who you are
Role
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
- Comfortable making performance creative, static and video, and iterating on it every week against real numbers
- 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
- 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
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. You do not need a decade of experience or a famous résumé; some of the best people for this are a few years out of school and hungry to prove it.
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, shaped with the founders and given its form by you, with no committee and no bureaucracy between you and the work. Your work goes live in your first weeks, and if we succeed, the brand everyone recognizes will be the one you built. Your compensation is a competitive salary plus meaningful equity, so you share in what you help build.
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: Competitive salary plus meaningful equity
