AI Research Engineer - Foundation Models AI & Engineering Berlin; London; Munich; Paris

Full-time

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 re‑define perception by building foundational intelligence for the physical world. You will research, design, and train large‑scale Foundational Models that transform complex multimodal sensor data into cutting‑edge autonomous capabilities, and you will be responsible for the entire model lifecycle—from data curation and training to evaluation.

Hold an MSc or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, or Mathematics with a focus on Deep Learning.

Possess theoretical understanding and practical experience in training Foundational Models (LLMs, VLMs, or other large‐scale multimodal models) from scratch or through fine‑tuning.

Have strong software engineering skills in Python and fluency with modern DL frameworks (PyTorch/JAX). You don’t just import libraries; you are comfortable writing custom layers, loss functions, and distributed training loops.

Are a clear communicator who can translate complex theoretical concepts and contribute to the company’s internal research culture.

Have a first‑principles mindset: you enjoy reading the latest ArXiv papers and implementing them into the codebase rapidly.

Note:

We operate at an intersection 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.

Top‑Tier Research Track Record: authored publications in top‑tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ACL) regarding attention mechanisms, efficient transformers, or multimodal learning.

Experience training models on large‑scale GPU clusters.

Proven experience in data curation, data cleaning, data pruning, and building robust data pipelines for large‑scale datasets.

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 and we operate in a domain where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital.

You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact. Our work frequently reaches the state of the art in reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, and deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering an exciting phase of technological development.

Success is a matter of order‑of‑magnitude improvements and novel capabilities, so we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already secured multiple significant government contracts.

We actively encourage diverse debate internally, trust and empower teams, and invite you to shape how we work. You’ll have a say in our culture and the chance to pursue outcomes that matter.

Competitive salary and stock options (ESOP)

Relocation support
: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation

Learning
: €500/£450 yearly allowance

Health & wellness
: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health)

Social
: regular company events and monthly social allowances

Enhanced parental leave
: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers and 6 weeks for secondary caregivers

Family support
: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work

These are the core benefits across all locations; there may be additional benefits in certain locations.

Helsing is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability or gender identity. Please do not submit personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, data concerning your health, or data concerning your sexual orientation.