The VP of Engineering will lead the technical aspects of the engineering team, overseeing architecture, strategy, and team growth while managing direct reports and engaging in hands-on technical work.
About Helm Health
The Role
Responsibilities
Requirements
Preferred Qualifications
Characteristics
Internal Tools/Technology
Compensation
Benefits/Offerings
Occasional Travel
Helm is a Series A start-up transforming health insurance with "Dynamic Copay" – a new insurance plan that allows members to see simple upfront prices for all medical care before making decisions. Our team is building the infrastructure to power these plans for health insurance payors. With Helm, our clients offer simpler health plans to their members, helping them navigate to higher-value care.
Our team has specialized in Dynamic Copay solutions since 2020, and Helm is the only independent platform in the market. We have grown rapidly since our launch, working with clients from local health plans to the nation's largest health insurers. The market is forming around us, making it an exciting time to join!
The Role
We're seeking a VP of Engineering to serve as the CTO's technical counterpart in scaling our engineering organization. This role combines deep, hands-on technical leadership with the people management and process maturity required to grow a rapidly scaling team. You'll be expected to contribute across every layer of our stack — writing code, reviewing architecture, responding to incidents, leading client conversations, and managing team leads. The right person for this role is a true engineering generalist who has built and shipped complex systems and is now ready to multiply their impact through an organization.
- Partner with the CTO to define and execute engineering strategy, org structure, and hiring plans
- Take on direct management of team leads, including 1:1s, career development, and performance management.
- Serve as a technical escalation point across all engineering teams and product areas.s
- Participate in architecture reviews and make binding technical decisions when needed.
- Respond to production incidents alongside the on-call team
- Own and improve engineering processes: sprint cadence, release management, code review standards, incident response, postmortems
- Represent engineering in cross-functional discussions with product, operations, and client-facing teams
- Meet with clients when technical depth is required
- Drive compliance and security practices across engineering (HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, HITRUST)
- Help recruit, interview, and close senior and leadership engineering hires
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time as a hands-on technical leader
- Deep expertise across multiple domains: backend services, cloud infrastructure, data systems, and frontend architecture
- Experience managing engineering managers or tech leads (not just ICs)
- Go and TypeScript proficiency
- Strong understanding of PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Redis, Firestore, and cloud-native database patterns
- Experience with Google Cloud Platform (or equivalent depth with willingness to work in GCP)
- Docker/Kubernetes
- Python proficiency
- Health insurance or claims processing experience
- HIPAA, SOC 2 Type 2, or HITRUST compliance experience
- Terraform/Terraform Cloud
- Experience with event-driven architectures, distributed systems, or real-time data pipelines
- Start-up experience, especially Series A through Series C growth stages
- Incident management and response leadership
- Technically fearless — you default to understanding problems at the deepest level available to you.
- High-integrity communicator — you say what you mean, flag risks early, anddon'tt paper over problems
- Generalist by nature —you're energized by switching between a Terraform module, a Go service, a React component, and a difficult personnel conversation in the same day
- Ownership mentality — you treat the entire engineering org as your responsibility, not just your direct reports
- Mission-driven — motivated by making healthcare simpler and more transparent
- Calm, clear, and decisive under pressure
- Cursor / Linear / GitHub / Notion / Whimsical
- Slack / Google Workspace / Zoom
- incident.io / Sentry / Drata / Cloudsmith / HCP Terraform
- Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — we are an AI-forward engineering team
- macOS / Linux
The target base salary range for this position is $225,000 - $275,000 and is part of a competitive total rewards package including equity and benefits. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors, including experience, skills, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations.
Benefits/Offerings
- Unlimited PTO (mandatory 12 days)
- Computer + home office stipend
- 401(k) + matching
- Health and dental insurance
- Autonomy and tons of room for career growth
We meet quarterly as a company.
Please note that this is a fully remote opportunity.
Top Skills
BigQuery
Docker
Firestore
Go
Google Cloud Platform
Kubernetes
Postgres
Redis
Typescript
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