Helical is building the in-silico labs for biology
Drug discovery still relies on wet labs: slow, expensive, and constrained by physical trial-and-error. Helical is changing that.
We build the application layer that makes Bio Foundation Models usable in real-world drug discovery, enabling pharma and biotech teams to run millions of virtual experiments in days, not years. Today, leading global pharma companies already use Helical, and we’re at the start of a highly ambitious growth journey.
We’re a founder-led, talent-dense team building a category-defining company from Europe. We care deeply about the quality of our work, move fast, and expect ownership. If you’re excited by complexity, real responsibility, and shaping how a company actually operates as it scales, you’ll feel at home here.
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior Web Developer with deep expertise in Next.js + React to lead the architecture and development of our user-facing dashboard.
This isn’t just another CRUD app — the dashboard orchestrates long-running workflows, displays high-volume biological and model data, and interacts with systems like Airflow, MLflow, and Jupyter. The complexity is real — and elegant frontend design is what makes it usable.
If you are exceptional at Next.js and React, understand how to structure component architectures that scale, and enjoy creating durable, well-designed UI systems, this is the role.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the React + Next.js application architecture
- Create robust UI patterns for complex workflows, logs, job status, and model results
- Design state management strategies using tools like React Query / TanStack Query
- Build clean and understandable abstractions around remote services (Airflow, MLflow, Jupyter)
- Define, implement, and maintain RBAC policies aligned with product requirements and security best practices.
- Write testable UI code and use mocking effectively in unit and integration tests
- Collaborate closely with product, backend, and ML engineers to shape user workflows
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience building production React applications
- React — component architecture, hooks, memoization, rendering patterns, suspense
- Next.js — routing, data loading strategies, server vs client rendering decisions
- TypeScript — types that clarify code, not complicate it
- State management at scale — e.g., React Query, Recoil, Zustand, MobX, etc.
- Authentication, authorization, and RBAC — implementing secure auth flows, role-based access control, and permission models using AWS Amplify Gen 2 and Cognito
- API design — crafting clear, consistent interfaces and integrating complex backend data structures (type safety with tRPC and zod)
- Experience with modern TypeScript ORM frameworks such as Prisma or Drizzle ORM
- Deploying frontend services using Docker on AWS
Nice to Haves
- Security & Reliability
- Experience implementing web security best practices, including input validation, CSP headers, and safe API interaction
- Unit, integration, and end-to-end testing (Jest, React Testing Library, MSW, Cypress, Selenium, or Playwright)
- UI / UX & Design Systems
- Experience working with component systems such as shadcn/ui, with attention to consistency, accessibility, and maintainable design patterns
- Strong UI/UX sensibility for scientific tools and data-rich interfaces, including experience collaborating in Figma and applying layout and usability principles
- Cloud, DevOps & Deployment
- Experience deploying and managing applications on AWS using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and containerized workflows (Docker, Docker Compose)
- Familiarity with Kubernetes-based deployments, including Helm charts and GitOps-style workflows
- Data, ML & Scientific Tooling
- Experience with machine learning, computational biology workflows, or data-intensive dashboards
- Familiarity with platforms and APIs such as Airflow, MLflow, or Jupyter Server
