Software Engineer - Airborne Mission Systems

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 program 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.

The role

Imagine building the vital infrastructure for a cutting-edge autonomous aerial platform that will actually take flight. At Helsing, you won't just be developing software; you'll be shaping the foundational capabilities for our own Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), the CA-1 Europa. This is a unique opportunity to directly contribute to a novel system designed from the ground up.

You will be building the higher-level mission control foundation, the sophisticated infrastructure that enables real-time sensor processing, secure communication, seamless integration of autonomous decision-making modules, and reliable interfacing with lower-level flight control systems. This isn't theoretical; your code will be critical to the CA-1 Europa's ability to fly, perceive, and operate effectively in the most demanding environments.

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 it 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 & Communications (e.g., intermittent connectivity and integrating with bespoke communication hardware and protocols)

• Embedded computing (e.g., resource-constrained compute and real-time operating systems)

• Networking (e.g., long-range low-bandwidth radios and cross-medium routing)

• Deployment & Integration Infrastructure (e.g., designing and implementing custom secure runtime environments for vendor code)

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.

The day-to-day

• Review code contributions, proposals, and RFCs from colleagues, ensuring robustness and adherence to safety and performance standards critical for airborne applications. 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, with a focus on refining the capabilities and reliability of our airborne mission systems. 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 reliability and performance, and fending off technical debt. The stack is a mix of Rust and Python, with Python mainly living in the ML-heavy sections.

• Further develop our tests and benchmarks, both at the micro and macro level, including hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations and flight testing. We operate in a domain where robustness is of the utmost importance, and an extensive and ever-improving test suite is key to achieving that. And without thorough benchmarks, we would be flying blind.

• Present your work at our weekly demo sessions. We want engineers to come together around what they are working on and to feel like they are not endlessly squirreling away at something that doesn’t matter. To that end, we host (and actively work towards) demo sessions that allow early feedback, celebration of progress, and a better shared understanding of everything that goes on at Helsing.

You should apply if you

• Can write legible, maintainable, and performant code.

• Communicate well in English, both verbally and in writing.

• Enjoy collaborating with others, including reviewing code and pair programming, particularly on complex system architectures involving tight hardware-software integration on a real-world aerial platform.

• Are comfortable working asynchronously (writing PRs and RFCs, having discussions by email).

• Have strong backend or embedded development experience, ideally with a language like Rust, Go, or C++.

• Feel comfortable developing distributed systems.

• Strive to improve yourself, your peers, and the culture you work in over time.

• Feel like ethical considerations are an inherent part of engineering.

Nice to have

• Significant experience with Rust.

• Network programming experience.

• Experience designing or implementing custom runtime environments, sandboxing, or secure execution contexts for third-party code.

• Experience with avionics, flight control systems, or Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC).

• Familiarity with low-level flight control systems and their interfaces, even if not directly developing them.

• Experience with sensor integration (IMUs, GPS, Lidar, Cameras) and sensor fusion techniques for navigation.

• Hardware interfaces (e.g., Arduino).

Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields

• 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 field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward.

• In our domain, success is a matter of order-of-magnitude improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts.

• We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn’t work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about.

What we offer

• A focus on outcomes, not time-tracking

• Competitive compensation and VSOP options

• Relocation support

• Social and education allowances

• Regular company events and all-hands to bring together employees as one team across Europe
  
  

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.