Helm — Mortgage Operations Platform

Helm is the platform a mortgage lender runs its back office on. Before it, everything lived in disconnected tools — loan data, commissions, closing documents, handoffs over email. Nothing reconciled, and a single funded loan touched four teams before anyone got paid.

I joined to replace that sprawl with one platform. It was greenfield — no prior interface, just processes buried in files — so the work was as much systems and workflow design as UI, built inside the company's existing design system.

It looked like five dashboards, but the hard part was underneath. Each workflow is genuinely complex — atomic payroll runs, contested commissions, reconciliation owned by two teams at once — and the people running them aren't engineers. The same loan looks different to a loan officer and an accountant, yet has to stay one record.

I treated the loan record as the spine: every role's product is a different lens on the same data, so it only ever lives once. I sequenced the build by following the money — funded → post-close → reconciliation → commission → payroll → GL — so each domain shipped on the one before it.

Helm became the system the back office runs on — one source of truth across four teams, the export-and-reconcile cycle gone, disputes resolved in-system with a full audit trail, and non-engineers running multi-state financial workflows with confidence.