Staff Software Engineer
Who we are
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.
The role
At Helsing, our engineering culture is defined by technical impact, first-principles thinking, and high-agency execution. We are looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to serve as a primary technical anchor, driving architectural decisions and shipping code across our backend systems.
Designed for a builder who thrives on complexity and wants to remain close to the metal, you will have the autonomy to own projects from zero to one prototyping through to deploying resilient software on physical hardware.
Your impact is measured by your ability to design robust systems, write performance-optimised code, and act as a technical multiplier for our teams. You will architect solutions across highly resilient distributed systems built for network partitions, resource-constrained embedded hardware, secure networking protocols, and high-performance machine learning inference pipelines directly at the tactical edge.
The day-to-day
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Lead the review of complex code contributions, design proposals, and technical RFCs from colleagues. At Helsing we strongly believe that unblocking others and mentoring is the highest-leverage work you can do.
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Architect, propose, and implement major new f