Software Engineer - Backend

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.

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.

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.

Taken together, this brings a whole host of interesting engineering challenges across a wide variety of fields that you’ll help us solve. To give some examples:

• 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)

In several of these areas, we are working near the state-of-the-art; we actively read (and sometimes implement) research papers, and often need to push even further to make theory work in practice. In others, we are applying well-known techniques to real-world situations (with real-world limitations) that have never been used in before, which requires skill, diligence, and honing a deep understanding of the underlying technologies.

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others takes precedence over spending more time on your own work.
• Propose and implement new features, capabilities, algorithms, infrastructure, or even full products across our stack. We encourage our engineers to look beyond their immediate team for missed opportunities, and to speak up when they identify one.
• Become a mentor, find a mentee, and help support and develop our interviewing pipeline. The people make or break the company, and we want as many engineers as possible to be part of fostering and growing the organisation.
• Share your experience and technical know-how with other Helsingers. We host tech talks, get together for smaller “let’s learn together” groups, run topical office hours (e.g., on Rust), etc. to help each other get better with time.
• Maintain our existing software stack, including working with internal and external customers to identify issues, improving operational…