Brand Designer
Boston · Remote possible
About Helios
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'll own
Seven 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.
7. Marketing creative, across Helios and Roon
You make the ads that bring people in, static and video, for Roon today and Helios as it launches. With Canva, CapCut, and the current AI tools, a tested angle becomes a dozen variations in a day. We choose the angles together, and you turn them into creative we can put real money behind.
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
- 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
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. 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
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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