Software Engineer, DevSecOps AI & Engineering Washington, DC

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 join the Platform Engineering team as a security-focused engineer responsible for embedding security into every layer of our developer platform and software delivery pipeline. You will own the security posture of our development environment - ensuring CMMC Level 2 compliance, hardening our software supply chain, and implementing the controls required for product teams to achieve ATO against NIST and other cybersecurity frameworks.

You will work closely with platform and product engineers to build secure CI/CD pipelines, enforce policy-as-code, andmaintainthe shared infrastructure that all teams depend on. This role combines hands-on engineering with deep security expertise: you are not just auditing compliance,you are building the systems that make compliance automatic.

• Deploying, updating, and securing Kubernetes workloads through
  
  ArgoCDand Git Ops workflows

• Building andmaintainingsecure CI/CD pipelines that enforce policy, scan for vulnerabilities, and produce auditable build artifacts

• Maintaining and hardening shared services (Git Lab, Artifactory, container registries) that the entire organization depends on

• Implementing and enforcing security controls aligned with CMMC L2, NIST 800-171, and other frameworksrequiredfor ATO

• Securing the software supply chain: image signing, SBOM generation, dependency scanning, and provenance tracking

• Conducting threat modeling to surface architectural risks before they become incidents

• Detecting, investigating, and responding to security incidents across infrastructure and applications

• Working with product teams to ensure their workloads meet security and compliance requirements before and after deployment

• Supporting the secure hosting of ML/AI workloads, including model training environments and sensitive data handling

• Have 5+ years of experience inDev Sec Ops , security engineering, or infrastructure engineering with a security focus

• Have aBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related field

• Have deep experience with Kubernetes-deployment, networking, RBAC, podandclustersecurity, and operational troubleshooting

• Are proficient with
  
  ArgoCDor similar
  
  GitOpstooling for managing Kubernetes workloads at scale

• Have strong experience writing and maintaining
  
  Helm charts

• Are proficient in Python and Bash, with experience automating security and compliance workflows

• Understand software supply chain security, including container image hardening, FIPS-validated cryptography, vulnerability scanning, SBOM, and artifact signing

• Have hands‑on experience implementing security controls from frameworks like NIST 800-171, NIST 800-53, or CMMC

• Are comfortable with CI/CD pipeline design, particularly building in security gates, policy‑as‑code, and automated compliance checks

• Have working knowledge of AWS and can collaborate effectively on infrastructure decisions

• U.S. citizenship required

• Experience with Go or other systems programming languages

• Experience shepherding systems through an ATO process

• Familiarity with DISA STIGs and the Risk Management Framework (RMF)

• Familiarity with Terraform and infrastructure‑as‑code for cloud resources

• Experience with Nix orNixOS

• Experience with SIEM platforms (e.g., Elastic) and security monitoring/incident response

• Experience securing and deploying ML/AI workloads - GPU environments, training pipelines, data…