Founding Designer
Own the design system, the marketing site, and the product surface. You'll set the visual + interaction bar for everything Helpward ships, customer-facing and helper-facing.
About the role
We're hiring our first dedicated designer to take Helpward's current functional-but-utilitarian visual language and push it into a system that feels as deliberate as the operational mechanics. You'll work across marketing surfaces (homepage, help, safety, blog) and product surfaces (booking flow, helper onboarding, admin tooling). The design system will be public — every component documented and reusable.
What you'll do
- Audit and rebuild the current design language across marketing and product surfaces.
- Ship a public, documented design system — every component, every token, with rationale.
- Own marketing-page design quality (homepage, safety microsite, service landing pages).
- Partner with engineering on every customer-facing feature from sketch through ship.
- Define and defend the brand voice in copy as much as in visual.
What we're looking for
- 6+ years shipping product design at consumer-facing companies.
- Track record of building a design system that engineers actually use (not just a Figma library).
- Strong writing — you'll author marketing copy as often as you'll author components.
- Comfort in a small team where the line between 'designer' and 'PM' is whatever you say it is.
Nice to have
- Tailwind familiarity (we use Tailwind 4 with @theme tokens).
- Marketplace UX experience — particularly the asymmetric flows of customer vs supplier surfaces.
- Illustration or motion-design ability (the brand is currently visual-light; we'd like that to change).
How to apply
Email careers@helpward.com with a short note and your CV or LinkedIn. Reference the role title in the subject line. We respond to every applicant within 7 business days. The process is 3–4 conversations and a paid trial project.
- OperationsFounding Operations LeadOwn the day-to-day reality of the marketplace. Helper supply, customer experience, response-time commitments, the lot. You'll be employee #8 and the person every customer-impacting metric ladders to.
- Trust & SafetySenior Trust & Safety ManagerLead the team that screens every helper, adjudicates every escalated case, and shapes the policies that make Helpward worth booking. T&S is the moat; you're its operator.
- EngineeringFull-stack Engineer (Next.js + Supabase)Ship features end-to-end across our Next.js 16 + Supabase + Stripe stack. You'll own a feature area, work directly with the founder, and have outsized leverage over the product the entire team uses.
- CommunityHelper Community ManagerRun the helper side of the marketplace — recruitment, onboarding support, retention, and the in-person community gatherings that turn a gig into a craft.