Who we are

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams – and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications.

The role

At Helsing we develop and deliver AI-based capabilities and the enabling infrastructure that allow semi-autonomous platforms to localise, navigate, and perceive the world in real time. We build software that is subject to significant and unorthodox technical constraints, must operate in a wide variety of constantly-changing environments, and has to support an ever-growing list of challenging use-cases. What we build ultimately ends up in the hands of real people in high-risk, high-stress situations, so must be both reliable and frictionless. Engineering challenges include:

• Distributed systems (e.g., intermittent connectivity and byzantine actors)
• Embedded computing (e.g., resource-constrained compute and reverse-engineering)
• Robotics (e.g., control systems and tasking)
• Networking (e.g., long-range low-bandwidth radios and cross-medium routing)
• Deployment infrastructure (e.g., air-gapped devices and heterogenous fleets)
• Security (e.g., data sharing in low-trust, no-TLS networks and actually-secret data handling)
• Machine learning (e.g., systems for model development, storage, and dissemination)

The day-to-day

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues.
• Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack.
• Become a mentor, find a mentee, and help support and develop our interviewing pipeline.
• Share your experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers.
• Maintain our existing software stack, including working with internal and external customers to identify issues, improving operational reliability and performance, and fending off technical debt. The stack is a mix of Rust and Python, with Python mainly living in the ML-heavy sections.
• Further develop our tests and benchmarks, both at the micro and macro level.
• Present your work at our weekly demo sessions.

Why join us

• Helsing’s work is important. You’ll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns.
• The work is unique. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world.
• Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation.
• We take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities.
• We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally.

What we offer

• A focus on outcomes, not time-tracking
• Competitive compensation and VSOP options
• Relocation support
• Social and education allowances
• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe
• A hands-on onboarding program (affectionately labelled "Infraduction”)

You should apply if you

• Can write legible, maintainable, and performant code.
• Communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing.
• Enjoy collaborating with others, including reviewing code and pair programming.
• Are comfortable working asynchronously (writing PRs and RFCs, having discussions by email).
• Have backend development experience, ideally with a language like Rust, Java, Go, or C++.
• Are familiar with backend interface tools like REST, GraphQL, gRPC/Protocol Buffers, and Arrow.
• Strive to improve yourself, your peers, and the culture you work in over time.
• Feel like ethical considerations are an inherent part of engineering.

Nice to have

• Rust and Python specifically.
• Container-based and cloud-native application architectures (e.g., Docker, Azure, AWS).
• Metrics tooling (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
• SQL and streaming database systems.
• Routing protocols (e.g., IGP, BGP).
• Cryptographic protocols (e.g., Signal, WireGuard).
• Hardware interfaces (e.g., Arduino).
• Robotics (e.g., control systems).
• Production ML systems.