Software Engineer - Autonomous Air Systems
Helsing is seeking a Software Engineer to join our Autonomous Air Systems team, focusing on developing the autonomy brain for the CA-1 Europa, an advanced Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) within the Centaur project. This role offers the opportunity to integrate state-of-the-art reinforcement learning agents into operational systems, contributing directly to a novel autonomous platform designed from the ground up.
Key responsibilities include integrating reinforcement learning agents into high-performance runtime systems to enable real-time autonomous decision-making during flight. The engineer will develop reliable pipelines from sensor data to reinforcement learning inference to tactical execution, handle edge-case and failure-mode scenarios, and bridge Python-based reinforcement learning agents with Rust runtime systems for low-latency, reproducible inference. Additionally, the role involves managing distributed systems and communications, addressing intermittent connectivity and bespoke hardware protocols, and developing training infrastructure for distributed training and large-scale runs on custom simulators.
The ideal candidate will have strong backend or embedded development experience with languages such as Rust, Go, or C++, and be comfortable working with Python in machine learning-heavy sections of the stack. Proficiency in writing legible, maintainable, and performant code is essential, along with excellent communication skills in English, both verbally and in writing. The candidate should 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. Comfort with asynchronous work, such as writing pull requests and requests for comments, and having discussions by email, is also important.
Helsing offers a focus on outcomes rather than time-tracking, competitive compensation and stock options, relocation support, social and education allowances, and regular company events to foster team cohesion across Europe.
Joining Helsing means contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing ethical and geopolitical concerns. The work involves unique engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world, operating in a domain with highly unusual technical requirements and constraints where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. Helsing encourages healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about its work and how it chooses to do it, trusting teams and individual engineers to practice responsible autonomy and critical thinking, focusing on outcomes rather than conformity.