AI Research Engineer - GPU Simulation AI & Engineering Munich London - Paris

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.

As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously.

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.

Join our GPU simulation team and build the simulator that trains our reinforcement-learning agents for air autonomy. You will shape the simulator that turns complex air-combat scenarios into learning environments at scale, model the physics behind air combat, and support the transfer of those policies to the real aircraft. Your work will span flight model fidelity, scaling to thousands of parallel environments, and the training tooling that makes it all possible.

This role sits at the meeting point of AI, GPU computing and physics-based simulation, with room to grow into a leadership position as the team matures.

Build, extend, and scale our GPU-based simulator to train reinforcement-learning agents across thousands of parallel environments

Develop the tooling that underpins RL training, including domain randomisation, to improve sim-to-real generalisation

Improve the fidelity and performance of simulation models, from flight dynamics to sensing

Enable sim-to-real transfer by supporting the export of trained policies and assets into downstream simulators and, ultimately, onto physical hardware

Collaborate with AI specialists and engineers to align the simulator with training needs and mission-relevant outcomes

Hold an MSc or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, Control Engineering, or a closely related field

Possess solid software engineering skills, writing clean and well-structured code in Python and/or languages like Rust or modern C++, and have experience deploying software to production including testing, and monitoring

Bring depth in at least one of the following: GPU programming, high-performance simulation, physics or flight-dynamics modelling, or navigation and control

Own high-quality, maintainable code and shape the shared library and ecosystem that the wider team builds on

Care about our mission and want your work to have real operational impact

Note:

We operate in an industry where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

Have solid AI knowledge and can reason about how models are trained and evaluated

Have knowledge breadth across the specialist areas above, for example combining GPU programming with simulation environment design

Have deep GPU expertise, such as writing and optimising CUDA kernels, or expertise in libraries such as Taichi, NVIDIA Warp/CuteDSL, Triton or Helion

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. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. 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, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our…