Founding Engineer, Infrastructure & Platform

HelmGuard; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Daily team lunch and specialty coffee

Rooftop terrace overlooking King's X

On-site showers

AI tooling budget

Job summary

HelmGuard in London is seeking a senior backend engineer to own core platform services, deployment, and multi-tenant security. You will design and ship backend services, manage deploy pipelines, and shape Azure foundations to support our AI-native risk platform.

The role demands 6+ years of backend experience, deep infra expertise, TypeScript or similar, Terraform, and strong on-call discipline. We value ownership and pragmatic collaboration in a fast-growing, enterprise-focused environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience and ownership mindset.
• Significant Azure experience and ability to ramp on Azure quickly.

Responsibilities

• Build and own backend services across the platform, APIs, async workflows, and data models.
• Shape our Azure foundations: Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID, all under Terraform.
• Design multi-tenant isolation patterns across compute, data, and network layers - at the service and infra level.
• Own deployment pipelines, observability stack, and on-call posture as the platform scales.
• Build platform capabilities like long-running agent jobs and large document processing.
• Drive compliance evidence automation and broader compliance plumbing.
• Develop internal scripts and tools to enable secure, scalable feature development.

Skills

Backend engineering

Azure

TypeScript

Terraform

CI/CD

Security posture

On-call

End-to-end compliance

Tools

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Docker

PostgreSQL

Express

OpenAPI

Azure Container Apps

Service Bus

Job description

About HelmGuard

We're building agent-native risk infrastructure: risk management and trust building, delivered by AI agents, for a world increasingly run by them. As more decisions and transactions run through agents, the volume of risk to manage and trust to establish is growing very fast. Today both functions are fragmented, split across internal teams, point products, and outside consultants, and rebuilt from scratch whenever someone needs an answer. HelmGuard brings them onto one platform and runs them continuously: our agents sit on top of proprietary data and reassess as conditions change, rather than at fixed checkpoints. So our customers spend their time deciding and acting on what matters, not assembling the evidence to get there.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent across risk management and trust building annually. These funds are going to be reallocated to agent-native solutions in the next five years, and we will capture that spend.

We've grown to seven-figure revenue within months of product launch, on the back of multi-year contracts with leading enterprises in financial services, regulated technology, and healthcare. Our founders come from Palantir and academic institutions: Oxford, Stanford, and ETH. We're backed by leading UK and US institutional investors and exceptional angels from Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Palantir, SpaceXAI, and more.

We're hiring across founding-team roles for people who want outsize impact, the influence over direction and culture that comes only from joining this early, and pre-Series A equity upside.

Your Impact

Your work decides which customers HelmGuard can win at all. We sell to the people who say no for a living, the security and compliance teams at banks and hospitals, and they won't sign until they're convinced the platform underneath is as trustworthy as the work it produces. You own that layer. You'll build the platform that makes our AI-native services thesis real: agents that don't assist with workflows but become the system of action for them.

The Role

You build the backend services at the core of HelmGuard, and you own the foundations on which they run. Most engineers can ship a service; you're the one who also knows how it should be deployed, isolated, observed, and secured in a multi-tenant enterprise environment. That combination is rare, and it's exactly what we need as the platform becomes load-bearing for regulated customers.

What You Will Do

• Build and own backend services across the platform, APIs, async workflows, and data models with the same care you bring to the infrastructure under them

• Shape our Azure foundations: Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID, all under Terraform

• Design multi-tenant isolation patterns across compute, data, and network layers - at the service layer and the infra layer

• Own the deployment pipelines, observability stack, and on-call posture as the platform scales

• Build the platform capabilities the rest of the team depends on: long-running agent jobs, large document processing, secure tool execution

• Drive compliance evidence automation and the broader compliance plumbing

• Build up internal skill files, scripts and tools to allow others to easily develop new features whilst keeping the platform secure and reliable

What You Bring

• 6+ years of backend engineering, with deep infrastructure experience — you ship services, and you own how they run

• Significant Azure time (AWS or GCP is fine if you'll ramp on Azure fast)

• Strong in a backend language - TypeScript ideally, or an adjacent one with an appetite to switch

• Production IaC (Terraform), CI/CD (GitHub Actions or similar), and container orchestration

• Strong security posture: IAM, network segmentation, secrets, supply chain

• End-to-end compliance ownership (SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar): designing the controls, not just answering about them

• Operational maturity: you've been on-call for systems that mattered

Nice to Have

• AKS, Service Bus, or Front Door at scale

• Multi-tenant SaaS isolation experience

• Running infrastructure for an audit-sensitive product

Culture and Values

We value a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We also hold a small set of core beliefs that reflect how we operate, and share them transparently with candidates so the fit is clear from the outset.

Put Customers First. Our customers buy outcomes from us, not features. We judge every decision by whether it delivers on that promise.

Take Ownership. Founding-stage means problems don't come pre-scoped. You see something that needs doing, scope it, ship it, and own the outcome. We expect this from everyone and provide you the backing to execute on it.

Work Hard, With Gratitude. This is the most consequential window for building enterprise software in a generation. We work hard because the opportunity is rare, and we do it with gratitude for the moment, for the people we get to build it with, and for the customers willing to bet on us this early.

Say the Silly Thing. The best ideas usually start out sounding half-baked, so we'd rather you say the silly thing than sit on it. We want you opinionated and willing to argue, and just as willing to change your mind when someone makes a better case. Disagreement here is a contribution, and not a risk.

Working at HelmGuard

Location. King's Cross, London (Gridiron building). We're built around in-person collaboration and expect most days to be in-office, with flexibility for the days that need it.

Compensation. Top decile for the London market, with meaningful EMI-eligible options.

Perks. Daily team lunch and specialty coffee, a roof terrace overlooking King's Cross, on‑site showers for those who enjoy active commuting, and serious per‑engineer AI tooling and API budgets.

Interview process. Three stages: behavioural phone screen, technical phone screen, and a paid on‑site work trial. Target turnaround is under two weeks from first conversation.

Tech Stack. TypeScript, Node.js, React, Tailwind, OpenAPI, Express, Azure (Container Apps, Service Bus, Front Door, Entra ID), Postgres, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker. Anthropic‑first AI with in-house evals and scaffolding. Claude Code throughout.