Applied ML Engineer—Detection & Tracking; Remote

Who we are

Helsing develops artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities to protect and defend democracies. We build Altra, an AI-powered drone software platform, and HX-2, our autonomous drone. We are growing our US operations, cultivating an ambitious and committed team of mission-driven professionals to apply their skills to solve challenging problems.

You will own the detection and tracking models that power Helsing's products — training, tuning, and deploying models against US-specific datasets. This is an applied ML role: you won't be writing research papers, but you will be expected to have strong intuition for model performance, data quality, and the practical trade-offs involved in getting detection and tracking systems to work reliably in production.

You will manage the full model lifecycle — from assessing and curating training data through annotation, training, evaluation, and deployment to edge platforms.

• Training and fine-tuning detection models (YOLO, DETR, Faster R-CNN, and similar architectures) on mission-specific datasets

• Implementing and improving multi-object tracking pipelines (SORT, DeepSORT, Byte Track, or similar)

• Evaluating model performance: analyzing metrics, diagnosing failure modes, and iterating on data and model improvements

• Managing the data pipeline end-to-end: assessing raw data, coordinating annotation, curating datasets, and implementing augmentation strategies

• Optimizing models for deployment on SWaP-constrained and embedded platforms (quantization, pruning, TensorRT, ONNX export)

• Collaborating with systems engineers to integrate models into the broader Altra platform

• Working across sensor modalities as needed, including electro-optical, infrared, and other imaging sources

• Have 5+ years of experience in applied machine learning or computer vision

• Have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field;
  Master's or PhD strongly preferred

• Have production experience training and deploying object detection models — not just research or academic projects

• Are proficient in Python and PyTorch or a comparable deep learning framework

• Have strong intuition for data quality; you can look at annotated datasets, training curves, and evaluation metrics and know what's wrong

• Have experience with the full model training lifecycle: data curation, annotation management, training, evaluation, and deployment

• Have experience optimizing models for deployment on SWaP-constrained and edge platforms (TensorRT, ONNX, quantization)

• Understand multi-object tracking and have implemented or worked with tracking algorithms in practice

• Can read and contextualize scientific papers in computer vision and apply findings to production systems

• U.S. citizenship required

• Strong proficiency in Rust or C++ for production model deployment and optimization

• Experience with multiple sensor modalities — particularly infrared or thermal imaging

• Familiarity with MLOps tooling: experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases), dataset versioning, model registries

• Experience with annotation tools and workflows (CVAT, Label Studio, or similar)

• Background in computer vision beyond detection — segmentation, pose estimation, activity recognition

• Experience with simulators, emulators, or synthetic data generation for training and evaluation

• Experience deploying models on GPU-accelerated embedded platforms (NVIDIA Jetson, similar)

• Background in defense, intelligence, or other mission-critical environments

• 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…