AI Research Engineer - Robotics
Helsing is seeking an AI Research Engineer specializing in robotics to join our dynamic team in either Barcelona or Paris. As a defense AI company, Helsing is dedicated to protecting democracies by achieving technological leadership, enabling open societies to make sovereign decisions while upholding ethical standards. This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to AI capabilities in one of the most challenging sectors, where high generalization capabilities must be paired with hardware constraints and robustness against adversarial attacks.
In this position, you will be part of a team focused on advancing robotics through reinforcement learning. Your primary responsibilities will include designing, training, and deploying reinforcement learning-based controllers for robots operating in complex, unstructured, and dynamic real-world environments where classical control approaches fall short. This involves enabling robots to perceive and understand their surroundings by fusing rich sensory inputs, including vision, to inform robust and adaptive control. You will own the full pipeline from simulation to deployment, ensuring that learned policies are robust, efficient, and ready for real-world operation under tight hardware constraints.
The ideal candidate holds an MSc or PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Control Engineering, or a closely related field, with a strong focus on reinforcement learning and robot control. You should have hands-on experience training and deploying reinforcement learning-based controllers on real robotic hardware, not just in simulation. A deep familiarity with modern reinforcement learning techniques for continuous control, such as model-free methods (PPO, SAC, TD3), model-based RL, hierarchical RL, sim-to-real transfer strategies, domain randomization, and curriculum learning, is essential. A solid understanding of robot dynamics, kinematics, and classical control theory (e.g., PID, model predictive control, trajectory optimization) is also required. Proficiency in building and working with physics-based simulators (e.g., MuJoCo, Isaac Gym/Isaac Lab, PyBullet, Gazebo) for training and validating RL policies is important. Strong software engineering skills, including writing clean and well-structured code in Python and/or languages like Rust or modern C++, and experience deploying AI software to production, including testing, QA, and monitoring, are necessary. Excellent communication skills and the ability to report and present research findings clearly and efficiently, both internally and externally, are also important.
Helsing offers a focus on outcomes rather than time-tracking, competitive compensation and stock options, relocation support, social and education allowances, regular company events, and a hands-on onboarding program. We operate in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, 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 defense industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve, and Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward.